Week 6 Discussion
I want to comment on the Curwood, Magnifico, Lammers piece, “Writing in the Wild: Writers’ motivation in fan-based affinity spaces.” Overall, I greatly enjoyed this piece, especially in relation to my user interviewing and testing. My child gave me the feedback that she wanted the writing kit to shift in perspective. Instead of being her journal, she wanted it to be the journal of her favorite doll, Frankie Stein ( Monster High). In essence, she was requesting a fan-fiction writing toolkit to write about Frankie’s Monster High adventures. The week six writings couldn’t have been more timely for the development of my product. I ended up redesigning my Beyond Bits and Atoms course “dream toy” prototype around her feedback. The journal became a secret closet for her doll, with a hidden door beneath for the doll’s journal, and a series of other features that could help her through the inspiration and writing process.
I also want to respond to this particular quote in the final paragraph:
Our field needs to move beyond focusing on young adults’ new literacy practices in the wild, or in informal out-of-school spaces, to articulate how teachers can design for new literacies in school-based settings. All too often, technology creates a digital divide across students, teachers, and schools. If young people have self-directed, multimodal, and authentic writing opportunities in out-of-school settings, this divide will only widen.
It seems to me that the educational researchers in this piece are posing uncompelling solutions to the divide between in-school and out-of-school learning. They want students to engage in this kind of self-directed and multimodal writing within the school context, but at the same time, are posing that teachers can achieve this through simply designing surveys, incorporating a closed and safe online writing portal, engage in collaboration, and offer opportunities for students to share work in class. I would argue that most teachers already do all of these things, and yet it’s not anywhere as engaging or invigorating as a free fan-fiction community where relationships to characters and texts are central to the endeavor, as demonstrated in the article’s examples.
On the flip-side, they say that educators shouldn’t try to become pop-culture contemporaries, but what else can they do to meet the child on their level of passion and enthusiasm, and coach them through their writing?
The limitations of a linear curriculum timeline will always inhibit classrooms from feeling authentic in the post-digital-revolution world.
If students had an opportunity to share how they were “writing in the wild” with the rest of the classroom, this seems to be the best way to incorporate how these online communities are impacting them for the better (or not, and teachers intervene). If students were allowed to make teams around works of fiction that they enjoy the most, and choose the skills they want to work on individually in each piece of authentic writing, this seems like another way to create that relationships with characters building element, which seems to be the most central and binding element of fan-fiction.
