What is digital writing?

What does digital writing mean to me as a writer? As a teacher?

As a writer, I find digital writing fun. It’s more than just my words: I can choose to make my message joyful, vivid, dreary, or mysterious. I can personalize my writing even more to convey emotions, moods, or capture the reader’s interest. You and I could say basically the same thing but what we add to the words—visually or through music—as well as the format we choose to share our writing could lead to two completely different messages. I’ve always been an aspiring techie so I find it fun to learn new tools, new ways of doing things. I could play with a new software or website for days! So as a writer, I’d like to learn more cool ways to write digitally. What else is out there that I haven’t yet played with?

As a writer, I also like the instantaneous nature of digital writing: once I click on that save/send/upload button my writing is “out there” for all to read: no need for stamps or multiple copies; no long wait for feedback. More importantly, as a writer I can choose my audience. I can restrict to share my thoughts with only a chosen few or I can voice my opinions for the whole world to hear. Regardless of the scope of my audience, it’s an authentic audience and the fact that I chose it gives purpose to my writing. I’d like to learn how to better guide teachers’ thinking in order to broaden the scope of their students’ audience.

The same things that excite me as a writer concern me as a teacher. Students need thoughtful guidance and structure to choose the right format, the right tools, and to not get lost in the glitz of multimodal writing. The danger is there: think PowerPoint slide transitions overload to the tenth power! How do we help teachers and students think clearly about their purpose to choose the right tools?

Also, being an aspiring techie is a dangerous state. I’m enthusiastic so I go deeper but it’s when I reach an impasse that I realize there’s so much I still don’t know… It’s the “how did I get here?” syndrome. Add to that a class full of young elementary students depending on you to be “all knowing” and we’re all stuck. Kind of like when the server goes down in the middle of your lesson… The ever-changing technology can be daunting. If teachers try to do too much, they will crash and burn in frustration. And if we ask students to do too much, we will “wiki them to death” to use the expression of a colleague. I’d like to spend time thinking about how digital writing stays manageable for teachers and students. Along the same lines is the reality that digital writing can’t be an add-on: it has to replace paper-pencil writing tasks.

As a teacher, the instantaneous nature of digital writing also worries me. First of all, it encourages too much short-answer, one-liner type of writing. While that might be exactly what a primary student or an ELL need, but it’s no way to foster deep thinking through writing. How much depth can there be in 140 characters? Secondly, the instant nature of digital writing encourages us to upload writing before it’s polished. We wouldn’t publish an article in a newspaper that wasn’t properly revised, edited and fixed. Likewise, we shouldn’t publish digital writing that isn’t “perfect” (I know there is no such thing). It’s no different in the digital world than it is in the paper-pencil world: we need to insist on following the writing process for digital writing before it is shared. How do we structure instructional time so digital writing works within the writer’s workshop but isn’t the last publishing step in the process (and an add-on)?

One of the greatest benefits of digital writing is the real audience it provides students. Who cares about writing a description of the monarch butterfly’s development for the teacher? But using pictures, videos, interviews to describe the monarch’s life cycle and its incredible journey to Mexico for a class halfway across the world that has never seen a live monarch... now that’s cool! Or maybe it’s sharing the daily observations of the monarch’s development with a local school that is studying monarchs but can’t afford to raise them, while exchanging hypothesis and research. Or maybe it’s sharing the same information with a school in Mexico where students wonder how far north the monarchs fly and how long it takes them to get there each spring. Each task, geared to a different audience, takes on a different purpose. As a teacher I have two concerns. First, are we finding truly authentic audiences for students’ writing? Secondly, are the needs of that audience surpassing our primary purpose: fulfilling our state standards? Sometimes projects with the best intentions become huge. Yes, they really motivate students. But are they truly what we need to teach?

Lots of thoughts… Lots of questions… I can’t wait to dig into digital writing!