Examples illustrating ineffective conversational writing on the Internet

We cover the importance of precise conversational writing on the Internet, suggesting practices like careful reading of other's messages, responding to specific requests, meeting commitments one makes, and quoting previous messages when necessary to retain context.

To illustrate these principles, I have posted two examples of ineffective conversational Internet writing. They are example 1 and example 2.

Can you find places in these examples where each of the above practices was ignored?

Writing very short documents -- Twitter posts

Writing short documents is one of our Internet content creation skills. Twitter posts are an extreme form of short document, and they are unique to the Internet (well ... perhaps fortune cookies too).

By spending a couple of minutes on a Twitter post, one can get two or three points across. My posts have gotten longer, approaching the 140 character limit over time.

Many UK children write on the Internet, and those who do consider themselves better writers than those who do not

The UK-based National Literacy Trust has done a survey on Young people's writing: Attitudes, behaviour and the role of technology.

The report, which is available online, outlines findings from 3001 pupils aged 9-16 from England and Scotland, who completed an online survey in May 2009. It explores the link between writing and gender and age differences, socio-economic background, mobile phone ownership, having a blog, and having a social network profile. It concludes with practical and policy implications.

A few of the findings:

• 75% of young people said they write regularly -- online and off.
• 56% of young people said they had a profile on a social networking site, such as Bebo or Facebook. 24% said that they have their own blog.
• Young people who write on a blog were much more likely than young people who do not write on a blog to enjoy writing in general (57% vs. 40%) and to enjoy writing for family/friends in particular (79% vs. 55%).
• Young people with a blog (61%) as well as young people with a profile on a social networking site (56%) also displayed greater confidence, believing themselves to be good writers.
• Owning a mobile phone does not appear to alter young people’s enjoyment of writing, their writing behaviour or their attitudes towards writing.
• Most young people said they used computers regularly and believed that computers are beneficial to their writing
• Nearly 60% of young people believe computers allow them to be more creative, concentrate more and encourage them to write more often.
• Just under 9 in 10 young people see writing as an important skill to succeed in life
• In line with governmental figures, which show that girls outperform boys in writing.
• There was a dip in enjoyment of writing, writing behaviour and attitudes towards writing at ages 11-14, but they recover again in pupils aged 14-16.
• There was not a relationship between economic status (receiving free school meals) and enjoyment of writing, writing behaviour, or attitudes towards writing; however pupils who do not receive; howver, students who recieved free meals lacked confidence, rating themselves as worse writers.

Presentation on writing for the Internet

I gave a talk on teaching Internet writing at an online teaching conference at Cal State Los Angeles last week. The talk put Internet writing in the context of the concept of IT literacy, then covered three types of Internet writing:

• Conversational writing
• Writing short documents
• Collaborative writing

The presentation includes links to full presentations and teaching exercises on each of these types of writing.

(Click on the "writing" label for other writing posts on this blog)

Will WolframAlpha impact the IT literacy curriculum?

I recently posted a few examples of symbolic math calculation using the WolframAlpha Internet service, and asked how it might affect math teaching. WolframAlpha, which presents a command-line interface to Wolfram's Mathematica symbolic math package, is capable of doing math homework and solving exam questions from junior high through graduate school.

The pros and cons of using WolframAlpha in teaching math are discussed in the article A Calculating Web Site Could Ignite a New Campus 'Math War', and there is a Wiki with many examples on teaching undergraduate math using WolframAlpha.

Math teacher Maria Andersen posted a discussion of the likely impact of WolframAlpha on math education, in which she predicts that students will flock to it and many, but not all, teachers will do the same. She uses innovation diffusion theory to analyze the likely rate of adoption of WolframAlpha relative to traditional symbolic math packages.

The conservative view of using tools like calculators or WolframAlpha is captured in Isaac Asimov's story The Feeling of Power, depicting a future in which a technician amazes people because he has memorized the multiplication tables and can do arithmetic without a calculator.

Are math skills and concepts part of IT literacy? Is there room for any math in an IT literacy course? Where can WolframAlpha be used in the IT literacy curriculum?

We should teach the skills necessary to build an e-portfolio

We've defined IT literacy as being comprised of the skills and concepts needed to succeed as a student and after graduation as a professional and a citizen.

But, which skills should be included? Today's student needs a mix of content creation and high-level application development skills.

One way to look at this is to say, they need the skills to create an valuable e-portfolio while in school and to continue it after graduation.

For more on e-portfolios, check this article, which discusses e-portfolios from both student and faculty perspectives .

Internet writing is important

A recent report on Writing, Teens and Technology found that 83% of parents of teens feel there is a greater need to write well today than there was 20 years ago. Eight six percent of teens ages 12-17 believe good writing is important to success in life -- some 56% describe it as essential and another 30% describe it as important.

Employers confirm the importance of writing on the job. Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, a leading software company lists five characteristics he looks for in a prospective employee:

• have a positive outlook
• be well rounded and flexible
• be a quick learner
• be trustworthy -- will find a solution to a problem
• be a good writer

Fried considers being a good writer most important, stating "Probably the most important thing and probably one of the surprises is you have to work with people who are good writers."

Joel Spolsky, well known programmer and author on the importance of writing to a software developer is also looking for good writers. He says "Being able to write clearly, to write English clearly is more important to developing useful software than almost anything else and that's something you're more likely to learn in the English department than in the computer science department."

The Fried and Spolsky quotes are from talks they gave. You will find links to the talks here.

Collaborative writing by small and very large groups

Wikis are perhaps the simplest collaborative writing tool, but they are best suited to compiled and simple co-authored documents.

For more complex co-authored documents we use network-based word processors. While they are limited and slow today, they will improve as technology like JavaScript interpreters, development tools and network speed improve.

For massively co-authored documents, documents with many authors, we need to add structure and social networking features. This class note discusses two sites for creating massively co-authored documents, PublicMarkup and WePC.

Role-based collaborative writing using a wiki

The following is an excerpt from an interview of Stewart Mader, who describes his use of a wiki for chemistry lab reports at Brown University. The role-based collaborative writing exercises benefited both students and teachers.

When I taught a chemistry lab years ago, I used a wiki to have students write collaborative lab reports. [Before the wiki, I had] 30 students in a lab where each student does an experiment and writes a report. You get 30 reports and 30 introductions and 30 methods and materials and 30 conclusions and so forth. Grading and evaluating that work becomes more about just getting through the pile on your desk than about really providing students in-depth feedback.

And for the students, I don't think they learn as much that way because they're focused on getting the thing done and turned in on time, and they're just repeating the same process over and over.

So one of the ways I used the wiki was to take a group of 30 students, split them up into six groups of five, and as they did an experiment, have each of those groups work much more like they would in the professional world. Teams would work on research projects, and when they wrote their report, each student was responsible for a different section. Student A would write the Abstract, Student B would write the Materials and Methods, and so on. For Experiment 2, roles changed, and Student B wrote the Abstract, and Student A wrote Materials and Methods.

The outcome for me was instead of getting 30 reports, I was now getting six reports, so I was able to spend much more time on those reports, reading what the students had written and giving them a lot more constructive, substantive feedback. For the students, they weren't slogging through with these repetitions every week. They were now trying out writing different parts of the report. Obviously, you're going to be stronger with some sections than another, so that means one week it might be a little easier you and that's fine because next week, you're going to work on the section that's a little more difficult and you are going to be able to really focus and refine your technique on that.

That's just one example, but that's the kind of thing a wiki can do in teaching. It can really allow instructors to focus on fewer, more in-depth assignments or products that are results of highly collaborative work by students.

The other benefit that comes out of that, especially with group work, is you can see what students are doing as they are doing it.... You can help students to keep a project on course towards success, versus derailing because there are problems in the group that you don't know about until the end of the project, when they come to you with a substandard result and start complaining about how members didn't pull their own weights.

Instead, you know what is going on, and you can see from the interaction they are having and the contribution of material in the wiki. If you see one person is noticeably absent from any contribution, you can talk to that person and say "Hey, are you having trouble with the tool, or are you having trouble with the assignment?" You can fix something like that in the first or second week, versus the twelfth week of the semester, when hope is lost.

This excerpt is from the The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed by Linda L Briggs.

Web skills are necessary for work

Since Kemeny and Kurtz introduced the notion of computer literacy, there has been a dual emphasis on job skills and concepts. The following two quotes suggest that Internet skills are needed in the workplace.

Patty Morrison, Executive VP and CIO, Motorola:

The next big thing for my business will be ... the explosion of Web 2.0 and the consumerization of IT. Organizations will need to completely rethink how they will provide end-user services to an incoming workforce that has more technical capability at home/school than the enterprise can offer.

Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft:

Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences – experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.

A table of skills and concepts for various students

Computer literacy is comprised of many skills and concepts, but they are not all appropriate for every student. This table lists some skills and concepts that might be appropriate for three groups of student. It could be extended and used as a checklist and an index to notes and exercises on each topic.

Digital visual literacy -- creating and interpreting images

Educause conducts hour long webcasts of topics of interest to University IT faculty and staff. Some of them have been relevant to computer literacy. For example, the program this week was Digital Visual Literacy: Interdisciplinary Skills for the 21st-Century Learner.

The webcast presents an NSF-sponsored project that began at the Brown University Computer Science Department, which is known for computer graphics. The project is based on the premise that digital literacy -- the ability to create and critically interpret visual images like graphs, photos and drawings -- is critical in the 21st century.

You might like to incorporate one of their teaching modules as part of a course you teach. The modules are:

• Introduction to Digital Visual Literacy
• Practical Visual Copyright Skills
• Visual Rhetoric for Blogs
• Visual Dialog in ECommerce
• Graphics Literacy
• 3D Graphics
• Visual Display of Information using Word 2003
• Visual Display of Information using Power Point 2003
• Influencing Decisions with Charts using Excel 2003
• Visual Display of Information in Word 2007
• Effective Visual Display of Information using Power Point 2007
• Influencing Decisions with Charts using Excel 2007

All of the teaching material is free, and they encourage us to use it, develop related material, and give them feedback -- to form a community of visual literacy teachers. You can get the modules and learn more here. (Before you can download modules, you must request a password by sending an email to co-principal investigator Oris Friesen, oris@cox.net).

Click here for archives of previous Educause Live webcasts.

Teaching Internet writing in a recreation and tourism managment course

One of the skills we might consider as part of computer literacy 3.0 is writing for the Internet.

We have also asked whether computer literacy should be spread throughout the curriculum or taught in one or more dedicated core courses

Larry Beck's course Wilderness and the Leisure Experience provides a good example of teaching Internet writing skills as part of a non-dedicated course. Beck provides small groups of students with the rough outline of a report, and they research and write it using a wiki. In doing so, they practice organizing themselves for collaborative writing and learn the mechanics of wiki and image processing software. Beck describes his course here, and you can see examples of student work here.

Beck spends a little time on a simple overview of the mechanics of using the wiki, and the students figure out the rest on their own. Someone in the group can usually help the others with the technology if need be. He gives them general instructions on the report outline and writing process, and requires periodic progress-check meetings with them.

See this presentation for an assessment Beck's experiments. (The writing portion begins with slide 23).

Writing for the Internet: conversations, short documents, and collaborative writing

I will write 42 pages for class this semester ... and over 500 pages of email. Student quote, 2008.

Probably the most important thing and probably one of the surprises is you have to work with people who are good writers, Jason Fried, 2005.

Being able to write clearly, to write English clearly is more important to developing useful software than almost anything else and that's something you’re more likely to learn in the English department than in the computer science department, Joel Spolsky, 2009.

I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter, Pascal, letter, 1656.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written, Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

---

Students often wonder what potential employers are looking for. Jason Fried of 37Signals lists his five hiring criteria in this short audio. He singles out good writing as the most important criteria:

And finally, and probably the most important thing and probably one of the surprises is you have to work with people who are good writers. Everybody has to be a good writer. The programmer has to be a good writer. The designer has to be a good writer. The business guy has to be a good writer That's how people communicate now. People don't talk as much as they used to. They IM all the time. They email all the time. They're hopefully posting messages to Basecamp all the time. And you have to find people who can communicate by writing. Its very very important. If there is any miscommunication going on, its just a chink in the armor and you're going to have a real problem with that. You have to make sure that people can write.

Fried is not referring to people who can write excellent essays or term papers with properly formatted bibliographies, but to people who can read and write in the concise, unambiguous, focused, conversational style used on the Internet. Much Internet writing takes the form of a conversation, for example, a blog post with comments, a response to an email or listserve post with quoted snippets, or posts to a threaded discussion.

Over twenty years ago, Terry Winograd defined a four-category taxonomy for conversations that seems to cover much of today's Internet writing:

• Conversations for action: a request or offer which is subsequently confirmed or dropped
• Conversations for clarification: obtaining more information about something said earlier or in a prior conversation
• Conversations for possibilities: creating ideas and selecting one or more for future discussion
• Conversations for orientation: exchanging information about themselves or a situation (bilateral or unilateral)

The possibilities for the unfolding of a conversation for action are illustrated in the following figure from Winograd and Flores (page 65).



Party A makes a request Party B. B can accept, decline, or make a counter offer. Each of these in turn has follow-on possibilities until the conversation ends in one of the bold face end points. If, for example, the conversation reaches node 5, B has asserted that their agreed upon action is complete and A confirms that.

Winograd and his colleagues developed a software product called The Coordinator which imposed the formal structure illustrated above on top of email. With The Coordinator, one did not merely send an unstructured email message, one initiated a formal conversation with a request, and the recipient either accepted, rejected or negotiated a commitment with a date. Once a commitment was made, the system generated messages to keep the action on track.

The Coordinator failed commercially because it was overly complex and rigid, and users could do much the same thing using email with to-do lists and milestones as found today in a program like 37Signal's Basecamp. However, The Coordinator foreshadowed the sort of writing we do today on the Internet -- the sort of writing our students need to practice.

Our students should also learn to write (and read) short documents like Web pages and blog posts. Students often ask how long a term paper or other written assignment must be, hoping it will not be too long. But Google, large fonts and wide margins make it easy to pad and lengthen a paper. Given the short attention span of people reading from a screen, today's students should learn to write short, focused documents. User interface consultant and researcher Jakob Nielsen offers guidelines for writing for blogs and the Web on his usability blog.

Nielsen's guidelines are based on research showing that people scan Web pages, taking time to read about 20 percent of the words. The problem is exacerbated by the ease with which students can "multi-task" while online. But, careful reading, not scanning, is required for online conversation and concise, link-filled documents. Our students must learn to read carefully, in the manner of Thoreau.

Today's student will also be expected to write collaboratively on the Internet, typically using a wiki or shared document. The simplest form of collaborative writing is creating a compiled document, where each author's contribution is independent of the others. A good way to introduce compiled writing is to have students build a list of something -- a class roster, recommended restaurants near campus, recommended Web sites, etc.

With a co-authored document, the division of labor is less clear. A lead author may begin with an outline and invite others to flesh the content out. Another possibility is that the lead author writes a first draft, then invites others to modify it. Perhaps the authors can meet face-to-face to plan their work before writing, perhaps not. Regardless, all authors are free to edit any portion of the evolving document. The Wikipedia includes a page on writing better articles.

There is a gray area between compiling and co-authoring -- one person may revise another person's contribution to a compilation. One thing all collaborative writing has in common -- when one edits a common document, their goal should be to improve it.