The folks at Slashdot ran an article from MIT’s Technology Review reporting how pop-culture online communities are providing students with creative writing opportunities not available in the traditional classroom. As a result of their participation, community members develop critical writing skills and literary techniques that are both quantitatively and qualitatively better than their school-based peers:

Why Heather Can Write
Not everything kids learn from popular culture is bad for them: Some of the best writing instruction takes place outside the classroom in online communities.
By Henry Jenkins

As quoted in the Technology Review article, …

… University of Madison Wisconsin professor James Gee calls these these informal — but authentic — learning cultures “affinity spaces.” I must say this is a new term to me, but an “affinity space” sure sounds a lot like a “community of practice” (Wenger). Indeed, the “informal teaching” characterized in the article sounds very similar to the process of “legitimate peripheral participation” described by Lave and Wenger.

From “Why Heather Can Write:”

At the Sugar Quill, another popular site, every posted story undergoes a peer-review process it calls “beta-reading.” New writers often go through multiple drafts before their stories are ready for posting. “The beta-reader service has really helped me to get the adverbs out of my writing and get my prepositions in the right place and improve my sentence structure and refine the overall quality of my writing,” explains the girl who writes under the pen name Sweeney Agonistes—a college freshman with years of publishing behind her.

And, from Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation, by Jean Lave (Author), Etienne Wenger (Author), Roy Pea (Editor), John Seely Brown (Editor), Christian Heath (Editor):

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. “Legitimate peripheral participation” provides as way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice…. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.

To me, the Tech Review article directly validates many of the core ideas found in the community of practice, knowledge management, cognitive apprenticeship, and situated learning schools of thought. However, reading the comments on the article posted on Slashdot, you might think otherwise. Take, for example, this enlightening contribution:

For every online community that may improve the writing of a handful of the kids who participate to it, there are 10’000 online communities where everyone (mostly native english speakers) spells like english was their fifth language that they’re still learning. That’s like saying that watching the debilitating cartoons on the usual channels improves kids’ imaginations and creativity. It’s a complete pile of arse.

There is a tiny minority who are improving themselves despite the apalling effects of the absence of grammar and spelling education, but pointing at those and saying “oh, look, the system works!” is just plain stupid.

Daniel

But one of the more amusing posts came from quantaman (517394), whose Slashdot has helped my writing skills! post said:

Seriously!

No, it hasn’t really improved my grammar or spelling (sorry grammar nazis), but through the obscene number of posts I’ve made since I’ve started contributing to slashdot discussions I have refined my writing skills. In my quest to come across intelligently and post something that people will want to read I’ve gained valuable communication skills. For evidence I simply consider how much better I do with respect to karma than when I first started posting, sure the karma bonus helps and I’ve probably learned to be a bit of a karma whore (why post something that no one will read) but I do believe a significant increase in the number of my comments that get modded up is due to writing skills I have improved by posting to slashdot.

As well I’ve even tried writing short stories and posting them on my site, not that they’re any good but it’s fun to put up something that someone might read (even if it’s only a couple friends who give pleasently baised reviews:). I don’t get to write as much as I’d like to but I’ve found I very much enjoy doing it and I am sure I never would of started if it was not for the ability to post them online even though no one will read them but a couple friends who I could have given them to anyway.

It doesn’t matter if it’s posts to slashdot or short stories on my site, the online community has inspired me to write things that require thought and that cannot help but cause my writing abilities to improve. Now I merely await the trolls who shall flock to point out that this post isn’t well written at all (hey it’s 1 am here!).

Ah, how I do love Slashdot!

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