An occasional publication of the Writing Initiatives Committee
This bulletin can be found online at http://www.msvu.ca/tlc/WIC/info.asp
THE BRIGHT IDEAS BULLETIN
Welcome to our 1st Bright Ideas Bulletin of
the 2008/09 academic year!
About W.I.C.:
W.I.C. is the Writing Initiatives Committee, a
standing sub-committee of the Senate Committee
on Teaching and Learning (S.C.O.T.L.). W.I.C.
reports to Senate through S.C.O.T.L.
The purpose of W.I.C. is to foster and promote
writing initiatives that benefit all members of the
Mount community with particular emphasis on
student learning. “Writing initiatives” include
university structures and activities related to
teaching, learning, study and practice of writing.
W.I.C. is:
 four members of faculty elected by Senate,
with at least one member from each faculty:
Dr. Valda Leighteizer (Faculty of Education), Chair;
Melissa Rossiter, Faculty of Professional Studies;
Dr. Janet Guildford, Faculty of Arts and Science;
Denyse Rodrigues, Extended Services Librarian
(Member-at-Large/S.C.O.T.L. Representative)
 Noelle Peach, Students’ Union Representative
(Faculty of Arts)
 Ex-officio members: Dr. Susan Drain, English
Department Writing Co-ordinator; Dr. Peggy
Watts, Director, Distance Learning and Continuing
Education; Tanya Crawford, M.D.E., Co-ordinator,
Teaching and Learning Centre; Student Affairs
Representative (t.b.a.)
Need a bright idea for your teaching?
The Writing Initiatives Committee held an
informal workshop about Collaborative
Writing initiatives at the Mount on Tuesday,
September 30.
Five faculty members, Susan Brigham, Mary
Delaney, Valda Leighteizer, Susan Walsh,
and DeNel Rehberg Sedo spoke about their
experiences with collaborative writing in the
context of their own scholarly work.
Susan Brigham talked about how she used
collaborative writing assignments in
graduate classes, and I spoke of my
somewhat tentative efforts at classroom
collaborative writing exercises with
undergraduate students. It was an
interesting, lively and well-attended event.
Those who engaged in collaborative
scholarly writing described their experience
as rewarding in a number of ways-expanding
the range of knowledge and approaches
brought to bear on the subject-and
personally satisfying.
However, concerns were also expressed,
particularly about evaluating the relative
roles of each collaborator in a project,
particularly a project involving several
people, and hierarchy of contributors in joint
publications.
Another issue raised by a number of the
speakers was the issue of trust-seen as a
vital pre-requisite to satisfactory
collaborative writing. Trust had to be built
slowly over a long period of time and couldn’t
be instantly generated.
Since the workshop, I found myself reflecting
on why we attempt collaborative writing
assignments for our undergraduate students.
What outcomes do we hope for and how do
we help our students achieve them?
The faculty members who spoke of the
rewards of collaborative writing talked about
the need for developing high levels of trust in
their collaborators and about how slowly
that trust is built. They also had the
opportunity to select the people with whom
they collaborate-or to think carefully about
accepting an invitation to work closely with
other scholars. Yet we often expect to put a
group together in class and have them
achieve a satisfactory collective experience.
A lack of trust in their collaborators is, in
fact, one of the first issues to arise for
students, who regularly complain that their
group members are not doing their share of
the work. The collaborating scholars also
talked about the time it took to develop the
processes of collaborative writing, and the
variety of tasks each member of the group
took on.
In my own experience, the practice of
collaborative writing is often a very slow onerequiring much passing of the work back and
forth to incorporate and integrate the various
ideas. Again, we usually expect our students
to work to a short term deadline, without
allowing the time to work out these issues
and to develop a comfortable process that
ensures each collaborator’s ideas are
respected and valued.
Many of our students will be called on in their
future studies and work to undertake
collaborative writing projects and we hope
their experience in our undergraduate
classrooms will help them develop the skills
to work comfortably and effectively in that
context.
In short, I’m looking for some direction and
help in creating collaborative writing
assignments with adequate guidelines for
working out the necessary processes to help
our students experience the intellectual
stimulation and satisfaction that our panel of
scholars experienced.
NEW BOOKS ABOUT WRITING
W.I.C. and the MSVU Library are pleased to
announce the following new books about writing:
Bailey, S. (2004). Academic writing:
A practical guide for students. New
York: Routledge. Available online
at:
http://www.myilibrary.com.www.msvu.ca:
2048/Browse/Open.asp?ID=5542
Eisner, C. & Vicinus, M. (2008).
Originality, imitation, and plagiarism:
Teaching writing in the digital age.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press. Call #: PN 167 O75 2008
Landrum, R. E. (2008).
Undergraduate writing in psychology:
Learning to tell the scientific story.
Washington, D.C.: American
Psychological Association.
Call #: BF 76.7 L36 2008
Silvia, P. J. (2007). How to write a
lot: A practical guide to productive
academic writing. Washington,
D.C.: American Psychological
Association.
Call #: PE 1408 S48787 2007
Turley, R.M. (2000). Writing essays: A guide for
students in English and the humanities. New York:
Routledge. Available online at:
http://www.myilibrary.com/browse/open.asp?ID=40226
Wyse, D. (2006). The good writing
guide for education students.
California: SAGE Publications.
Call #: LB 2369 W97 2006
How can we do that?
More of the library’s books about writing can be
read at http://www.msvu.ca/tlc/WIC/info.asp
-Dr. Janet Guildford, Department of History/Faculty of
Arts & Science representative
For sale in the Mount bookstore:
Sawers, N. (2002). Ten steps to
help you write better essays & term
papers (3rd ed.). NS Group.
Bright Ideas Bulletin
Issue #19
2
December 2008
concrete experience, reflective
observation, abstract conceptualization
and active experimentation/application,
suggested by the facilitator. Often, reflective
journal assignments neglect the last two
(significant) steps of the process.
FROM THE AAU
TEACHING SHOWCASE,
OCTOBER 25
http://www.unb.ca/conferences/aaushowcase/index.html
Looking Back While Moving Forward: A
Life Review Essay (Dr. Joan Turner,
Department of Child and Youth Study,
MSVU)
The Showcase theme, Teaching to Engage
and Retain, was demonstrated by a variety
of strategy-filled concurrent sessions one can
apply to ‘teach, engage and retain’ students
in higher education. Two writing-related
workshops I attended were:
Session abstract: First-year students are
prepared for a range of discipline specific and
university expectations; professors design
assignments that not only allow for the practice of
these skills but also as a method to assess the
ability of students to demonstrate them in written
work. The introduction of a Life Review essay
assignment early in the first semester of study
promotes the development of professional
practices through an exercise designed to target
specific skills.
I created the Life Review essay as a standard first
assignment in the introductory course,
Introduction to Child and Youth Care, to
encourage students to reflect on their past from
early childhood to young adulthood so they may
identify what influenced their decision to enroll in
Child and Youth Study- while presenting a writing
sample to their professor. This personal glimpse
into the backgrounds of students is helpful to
professors because it can enlighten us of the paths
that have led students to a specific university
program and into our classrooms. The purpose of
this interactive presentation is to explore the
application of strategies and outcomes of the
exercise across disciplines.
Documenting Experience Through
Reflective Writing (Shane Theunissen,
Saint Mary’s University)
Session abstract: Today’s university and college
classrooms, unlike the majority of those a
generation ago, utilize a wider range of teaching
strategies and technological tools to communicate
ideas and curricula to students. This evolution in
teaching has been slow to manifest itself in
teaching and assessment strategies currently in
use. I feel that reflective writing provides an
avenue for students to communicate their learning
and allow them to process and make meaning of
course content, discussions and experiences. The
process of reflective writing may also allow the
student to bridge their inner and outer world and
facilitate the paths from action to reflection, and
cognitive capability to personal transformation.
Reflective writing requires the student to
communicate their own course related learning
through a medium that when shared through
classroom presentations allows students to enter
into each other’s lives and communicate to each
other from an individual and largely selfdetermined perspective. Students are also
required to evaluate their own performance and
the performance of their peers during these
classroom discussions. Instructors facilitate this
evaluation process and retain a percentage of the
available grade for their own assessment of
performance. This grading strategy mimics peer
review which students will face throughout their
academic and professional lives, and broadens the
perspective through which material is critiqued.
Joan introduced the Essay rationale, purpose
and distributed a copy of the essay
assignment to us. She also circulated the
text, Making Sense: A student’s guide to
research and writing (2007) used in the Child
& Youth Study first year class. We discussed
the characteristics of a first year student and
what we hoped to learn about our studentsand what we hoped they would learn about
themselves-from the student’s Life Review
essay. We agreed the assignment could be
adapted and used by any discipline.
We began the session with receipt of a
Rubic’s cube and used the cube to write our
individual reflections about solving one side
of the cube using a four step process:
Bright Ideas Bulletin
Issue #19
-Tanya Crawford, Co-ordinator, Teaching and Learning
Centre
3
December 2008
WHAT’S NEW IN THE LITERATURE?
NEW VIDEO
Publishing your scholarly work:
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/2008/10/06/
publishing-your-scholarly-work.aspx
Passig, D. & Schwartz, G. (2007). Collaborative
writing: Online versus frontal. International Journal
on E-Learning, 6(3), 395-412.
The abstract: Students in higher education, most
frequently, use the frontal approach while being
asked to collaborate on a writing assignment.
However, the difficulty in collaborative writing
using conventional technologies such as pen and
paper, board or computer is the limited ability to
view the work of your peers during the process
(Baeker, Glass, Mitchell, & Posner, 1994). The aim
of this study was to examine the quality of an
online synchronized collaboratively written
academic assignment by graduate students. We
used the GROOVE tools to facilitate this study.
The products of the online synchronized
collaboratively written assignments were
compared with similar products produced in a
frontal and collaborative face-to-face approach.
The study examined the academic quality of the
written products achieved with both collaborative
methods – online versus frontal. The qualities of
the written papers were examined with an
instrument called the Cognitive Level and Quality
Writing Assessment (CLAQWA) (Flateby &
Metzger, 2001). The instrument defines the
parameters of the quality of an academic paper,
which reflect the writing skills based on Bloom's
taxonomy (1954). The findings of this study
indicate that collaborative writing in a peer-topeer (P2P) synchronized online environment could
produce a paper of a higher quality than that
produced in a P2P frontal face-to-face (F2F)
environment.
WRITE BACK!
W.I.C. welcomes your feedback to this issue,
suggestions for future issues or W.I.C.sponsored events. Feel free to contact any
member of W.I.C. or email our Chair,
Dr. Valda Leighteizer:
valda.leighteizer@msvu.ca
Read more about W.I.C. online at
http://www.msvu.ca/tlc/WIC/info.asp
from W.I.C.
May all your
teaching through writing
be bright!
A hard copy of this article is available from the
Teaching and Learning Centre, ext. 6766 or
tlc@msvu.ca
(FAIRLY) NEW ONLINE JOURNAL
“A uniquely interdisciplinary and collaborative
publication, Compendium 2 presents a fresh
perspective on university writing, teaching, and
learning in the twenty-first century.”
Submissions to the online journal are due January
5, 2009. For more information, visit
http://www.compendium2.ca/
Bright Ideas Bulletin
Issue #19
4
December 2008