TWELVE WAYS TO TEACH WRITING ONLINE

Writing on the Internet, students can learn to clarify their positions and to discover multiple points of view on an issue. They can discover real audiences and real purposes. There are many ways to teach writing online, but here are twelve suggestions to get you started. For more information, please contact me (mhalio@udel.edu).

1. Provide a discussion prompt and assign students to debate a topic from a reading in the class listserv.
2. Assign a student to lead an online discussion of a reading, defending the views of the writer.
3. Have students play Devil's Advocate online, challenging others to defend a position they have taken on a controversial issue.
4. Assign students to post their theses and supports for their essays and ask each other questions to clarify their positions.
5. Ask students to brainstorm in a chat room or newsgroup about ways to solve a problem raised in the readings. This assignment can be used to help students identify issues that they might want to work on together.
6. Assign students to post a draft of their essays on a bulletin board or in a distance-learning program such as SERF or WebCT. Students can then access these drafts and comment on them. They can also develop a sense of different authors' styles and rhetorical techniques.
7. So that students can discover complexity and multiple points of view on controversial topics, ask them to build a web page for your course based around an issue under discussion.
8. To bring new voices into a biased discussion, ask students to assume the identity of a person from a racial, religious, or socio-economic group not represented in the class. First, they should post a paragraph to the class (or small group) listserv describing the person whose views they will represent. After that, everything they say should be an attempt to represent the views of that person. This exercise often leads to greater awareness of complexity.
9. Ask students to join a listserv or newsgroup outside of the University on a topic related to an essay they are writing for class. They should lurk in the discussion group for a week and then summarize the views represented in the online discussion. They should analyze who is doing most of the writing and what each writer is contributing to the discussion. (Students can also be encouraged to post to the outside discussion group, if they are first warned about the dangers of "talking to strangers" online.
10. Create mini online discussion groups so that small groups can work collaboratively to solve real problems. You can serve as a consultant for these online discussions.
11. Assign students to write a hypertext argument (a web page with a thesis) where they can explore connections between their ideas and their online source material.
12. Assign students to critique web sites. For example, they can compare three web sites on the same topic and identify the audience and purpose for each site. They can also look for bias and decide which site would be the best source to use for a research paper.
    (Courtesy of Marcia Peoples Halio)