Kollaborativ lesing: lærer studenter bedre av å lese digitale tekster sammen?

Studies have shown that students learn better reading on paper than reading PDFs - but what if that is because we read differently in digital media, and need a different kind of reading interface? PDFs are simply digital images of texts that were laid out and designed for paper. Today's students have grown up with digital reading being social and participatory. We read and write comments on newspaper articles, and in social media the comments and discussions can be as important as the intitial text or image posted. Can this be used pedagogically?

The introduction of digital text analysis into university writing and literature courses, while leading to innovative ideas on multimedia and computation as a means for rhetorical enrichment, has also resulted in profound changes in writing pedagogy at almost all levels of its theory and practice. Because traditional approaches to examining and discussing assigned texts in the classroom derived from print-based formats, many university educators find these methods deficient when applied to digital reading environments. Even strategies in reading and text annotation need to be reconsidered methodologically in order to manage the ongoing shift from print to digital media formats within first year composition. Our current, ongoing project proposes one of the first and most extensive attempts to analyse systematically how learners engage with digital modes of reading both within the classroom and outside of it. Part of our study aims to demonstrate if and how learners may benefit from reading digital texts using Computer Assisted Text Analysis (CATA) software armed with improved textual interface design and better data visualization tools. This paper follows directly from these study aims, focusing on the development of various collaborative and group-oriented formats for annotation and analysis in digital reading practices. Early reports from our own study record the seemingly spontaneous emergence of numerous in-class micro-communities taking advantage of one program’s interface design to build a socially driven, communal approach to writing and reading for the academy.

A second phase of this project currently in development seeks to apply collaborative and group-oriented formats in text analysis to electronic poetry, building in the process a number of tools and methods that combine text generating devices with digital annotation and commentary practices. Key to our study will be to demonstrate how such tools and their interfaces can be subsequently re-developed to facilitate improved modes of interactive engagement with computational poetics. After providing a brief history of literary movements (from Surrealism to OULIPO) known for experimenting collectively with algorithmic procedures in writing, our workshop will explore a live set of collaborative writing exercises using new computational tools coded and constructed especially for the session. These devices, collected together in a single, web-based text generation and analysis program called the “Workbench”, allow writers to employ algorithmic, Natural Language Generation (NLG) processes in their respective writing practices both individually and as co-authors working on shared projects. When completed in terms of interface design, the “Workbench” seeks to provide a working model of interaction and dialogue within electronic literature, demonstrating, while implementing radical forms of community through a web-based interactive poetics. Discussions conducted during the session will centre on ways to revise electronic writing as the basis for new communities of practice capable of merging the tools of computational reasoning with social interaction.

Andrew Klobucar is Associate Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and is a guest researcher with the Electronic Literature and Digital Culture Research Groups at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at UiB in October and November 2018. He is a literary theorist and teacher, specializing in internet research, electronic writing/poetics, semantic technologies and Web 3.0. He is the director of the graduate program in Professional Communication.

His writings on experimental literary forms and genres continue to analyze the increasingly important role technology plays in contemporary cultural practices in both print and screen formats. He has worked on developing software for writing instruction and written on the use of programmable media in classroom instruction. Other projects include collaborative research between NJIT and Princeton’s educational testing services (ETS) analyzing the use of automated assessment software for reliable academic placement. 

His forthcoming book on the increasing influence of algorithmic programming and information theory on poetics and literary criticism, entitled, The Algorithmic Impulse: Programmable Writing and the Aesthetics of Information will be published by Alabama University Press next year. 

David is a computer programmer based in Vancouver, BC, who has worked with experimental writers, poets, and linguistic theorists in many Canadian small press projects for close to 15 years. His current interests lie in leveraging Computational Linguistics research to further the exploration of writing and digital technology. David holds a BSc in Computing Science with a specialization in software engineering from Simon Fraser University.