Strategically maintaining online learning community in a postgraduate writing program (original) (raw)
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How should lecturers teaching postgraduate creative writing in an online master of arts build and maintain e-community to support and socialize learners? The study proposes that such programs need to attend to writers’ investments in developing identities while promoting socialization and sense of belonging. Grounded in literature on communities of practice, imagined community, and identity, the study draws on social constructivist and poststructuralist insights and contributes to the relatively unexplored area of pedagogy for teaching writing online. The study uses qualitative descriptive analysis to narrate themes from two datasets in the form of a métissage. Data from lecturer-e-moderators and students indicate that strategic e-moderation encourages collaboration and maximizes pedagogical potential in forums. Strategic e-moderation builds a sense of community by fostering critical friendships. The study emphasizes the need for e-moderators to develop participants’ investments in working in communities. The study reveals that although postgraduate writing students come to value learning via critical friendships and communities, they also demand particularized feedback from e-moderators and peers. Findings suggest that students need to develop writing identities and voices can be met by a pedagogical approach that harnesses the potential of community while offering response to individual development. The study concludes that pedagogies of community in teaching writing online need to benefit both collectively and individually. This works when writers apply discipline-specific literacies and professional skills in critiquing peer texts, while responding to feedback from their community of practice, facilitated by e-moderators.
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This chapter addresses several issues and challenges that one faces when carrying out a real collaborative learning experience following a blended learning design that includes a mixture of face-to-face and online collaborative learning processes. The paper presents an experience based on a blended course on “Collaborative Educational Systems”. This scenario employed a variety of collaborative strategies, methods and tools to support and enhance debate and information exchange among peers in order to complete a specific task: writing an essay collaboratively. Carrying out this task entails a preliminary study and analysis of the subject matter, which are also performed in a collaborative manner. We describe the educational scenario in detail, including the structure of the activities, the rules the groups were asked to apply and the procedures the students had to follow to accomplish the task. We finally analyze and evaluate this learning experience with a critical point of view as regards the collaboration strategies adopted, the way students built their own strategies combining the ones presented in the course, and the collaborative learning process and product.
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How should lecturers teaching postgraduate creative writing in an online master of arts build and maintain e-community to support and socialize learners? The study proposes that such programs need to attend to writers’ investments in developing identities while promoting socialization and sense of belonging. Grounded in literature on communities of practice, imagined community, and identity, the study draws on social constructivist and poststructuralist insights and contributes to the relatively unexplored area of pedagogy for teaching writing online. The study uses qualitative descriptive analysis to narrate themes from two datasets in the form of a métissage. Data from lecturer-e-moderators and students indicate that strategic e-moderation encourages collaboration and maximizes pedagogical potential in forums. Strategic e-moderation builds a sense of community by fostering critical friendships. The study emphasizes the need for e-moderators to develop participants’ investments in ...