There is Always Pros and Cons

This is a teacher with a lot on her plate. Steph, one of the only teachers in all of umass that is utilizing the UmassWiki, is attempting to connect all writing classes together. She thoroughly describes of all the work that both her freshman and junior writing classes have done. Then she explains how she has connected the two classes together by way of the wiki and blogging. Steph sees this as a good idea because she is trying to actively show her classes that writing is a public action. She is also probably uniting her classes together so that everyone can receive more feedback and different points of views. The fact that the writing is getting more feedback is the main reason why almost all of her freshman say that they really enjoy Steph’s vision where students from different classes comment on someone else’s work on the web. They enjoy getting feedback from people outside of their own classroom. While the majority of her students are enthusiastic about her ideas, some of them are uneasy about the fact that people they do not know are reading their thoughts and feelings. However not one of them have made a complaint about the actual wiki or weblog in itself. This is where my opinion comes in, like the freshman I also feel like it is important to have readers outside of your classroom. That is why I think that some work on the wiki and wordpress is ok. However in an intensive writing class like this I think that maybe we should focus a little more on the actual act of writing rather than spending entire class periods learning how to get around the UmassWiki website. While this causes much frustration on my part I am confident that Steph is doing all of this for a reason which is why even though I am not a big fan of the wiki, I will still tolerate it and try my best to get something out of this class.