Everyone's a critic

Everyone's a critic, they say.

Until it comes to academic writing, that is. Many students fail to realise their full potential when it comes to essay writing, usually because they can't seem to find their way out of the descriptive cul-de-sac they make for themselves. If they could only find it within themselves to write critically, they would earn higher grades. So why do some find critical writing such a problem?

Firstly, knowing your field of study is an important factor in academic writing, and some students simply don't trawl deeply enough. If you know one theory, but are unaware that it has been challenged by another theory, you only have half the story, and you then find yourself on the periphery of the discourse. Knowing the weaknesses of a particular theory will only come from gaining an insight into how that theory came about, and understanding how it can be applied in particular contexts. So to be able to write critically, you need to have read around your subject - you need to have seen the 'big picture'.

Knowledge of your field is not enough though. Critical thinking is crucial to the process. You can think without writing, but you cannot write without thinking. It follows that critical writing comes from critical thinking. If you can't think critically, you won't be able to write critically. Students need to learn to think in a particular mode to be able to do this. One of the top tips I can give to anyone who wishes to write critically, is first to think critically about what they are reading, and learn to ask questions of the text. It is a kind of conversation the reader has with the author. Best questions to ask are questions such as 'how does this writer justify what s/he is saying?' or 'What support does this writer have for their ideas?' You may like to dig deeper and find out how their evidence was obtained. Were the data they used obtained from a particular sample, and were they biased, or contrived in some way? Is the writer being totally objective, or is there some hidden agenda in there?

Academic writing has the capability to generate a great deal of angst. For example, students often get hung up on whether they should be using the personal pronoun in their essays and projects. My view is that there is nothing wrong with it, provided the writer is not expressing their own unsupported opinion. Writing 'I reflected upon this experience and subsequently adjusted my professional practice...' is justifiable, but simply writing 'I believe that ....' is not enough.

In his blog post 5 ways to develop critical thinking in ICT, Terry Freedman offers some great advice on how teachers can probe understanding by repeatedly asking 'why?', or 'how do you know that?' If students can do this during the process of writing up their assignments, many of their descriptive, lack lustre passages could be transformed into dynamic critical, reflective and analytic pieces of writing. One aspect of marking assignments I find particularly unpalatable is when students churn out the same old, bland writing which merely represents what has been covered in the module, and not what they have learnt and critically applied to their practice.

Another pet hate I have is disjointed essay writing. Some students seem to think that they will impress the marker if they pepper their writing with copious direct quotations from the set readin lists. All they end up achieving is a series of unconnected quotations with no particular thread of reasoning running through them. Better by far is the art of paraphrasing key points from published authors and then applying these to support an argument that you are developing. Even better still is the ability to counterpoise these paraphrased elements to form a finely balanced discussion that shows you have thought deeply about all perspectives associated with your argument, and can logically organise them. Whichever way you examine essay writing though, it all tends to comes back to the ability to think critically.

Probably the best form of critical thinking emerges from dialogue within the community of practice. Carr and Kemmis (1997) highlighted the importance of dialectical thinking. Based on Hegel's realist philosophies, Carr and Kemmis propose that the tensions between opposing perspectives, where opponents take the stance of 'thesis' and 'antithesis', usually result in some kind of 'synthesis' of ideas. Although this can often be a compromise between the two opposing perspectives, more often than not, it is also a merging of the strengths of both arguments to form an even stronger, newer thesis. Development of such world views are the basis of all critical learning, and require the student to be open to new ideas, and open to being challenged in their own beliefs, values and thought processes.

Reference
Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1997) Being Critical: Education, knowledge and action research. London: Falmer Press.

Image by Enrique Sanabria


Everyone's a critic by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The truth about blogging

Anyone who blogs regularly will have discovered several truths. The first is that you are only as good as your last post. Many people struggle to maintain a regular blog that is consistently good, or at least meaningful. The blank page and writer's block are familar companions to all authors. But there is a contradiction here. Although you are only as good as your last blog, all your previously blogs are also out there, archived, published for people to read (and for you to revisit, if you wish). So be careful what you blog - the affordance of persistency is quite a powerful one, and can work either way.

The second truth is reflected in something that Shelly Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) has expanded upon in his excellent post 'Why teachers should blog'. I quote: To blog is to teach yourself what you think. For me, this is reflexivity in action. Your work is placed right out there on the blogosphere, in a public agora for others to read, reflect on, and comment on. It's a shop window displaying your thoughts, opinions or arguments to anyone who happens to walk on by. Blogging in effect, can contribute to an endless cycle of learning through content creation, feedback, reflection and refinement of thinking. It is this kind of critical reflection cycle that can build excellent, creative, flexible and responsive educators. I have on several occasions written concerning the reasons I blog, but let me extend my argument further to all of my writing efforts, paper and online:

I write because in the act of writing, I am written. In Daniel Chandler's terms, it is about constructing meaning, discovering and drawing out your internal thoughts, and externalising them in prose. He says: "The experience of ‘discovery’ in writing may sometimes represent having found a way to make one’s ideas coherent." In effect, as I write, I create concrete meaning from my abstract thoughts. Also, because the blog is public, I write for an audience. My writing has become a social act. As I learn my thoughts, I share them with you.

A third truth, deriving from my previous statement, is this: Writing on blogs is dialogical, much more so that it ever could have been in paper format. In some journals there is occasionally a dialogue between two experts, who each write a treatise in response to the arguments of the other. This kind of dialogue is as far removed from the debate as it is possible to get without disengaging totally. Far more immediate is the dialogue that can transpire between two or more protagonists when they are simultaneously online, and using the basis of a blog post to argue. This kind of dialectical process most closely resembles the debate, and synthesis of ideas can occur more quickly for those who are engaged. Even the lurkers, those who participate peripherally or merely observe, can gain from the experience of reading the content of the comments boxes.

So there are many reasons to blog, and even more reasons to blog regularly, especially if you are in the business of education.

Image source

The truth about blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

12 simple writing rules

This post is dedicated to all my students who are currently in the process of writing up their e-learning research assignments.

Writing is still a central component of academic success and always will be.

Yet many students still keep making the same simple errors - failing to proof read before they submit, typographical errors and grammatical errors could so easily be eliminated if only they took a little more time.

As usual, I have held several tutorials with each of my students, but there is no substitute for going back to look over the rules of the English language, getting grammar right, steering clear of repetition and avoiding all the avoidable little syntax errors you could of avoided.


1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They are old hat)
6. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also, too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Don't use no double negatives.
12. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Good luck to them all. :-D

Original source of the above content on how to write good.
And here's some more of them rules

Image source

Wiki working

I published two journal articles recently on the use of wikis in teaching and learning, and I'm making them available here on this blog. The links below allow you to download the full papers in .pdf format. I have also published several book chapters recently on the use of wikis in education which I will make available here over the next few weeks - so bookmark this space! A key message from both papers is that although students enjoy working and learning together, to facilitate effective collaborative learning, tutors need to know how to optimise the affordances of wikis. The first article came out of a whole term of gathering data from student teachers who were using wikis to support their study, and as a tool to encourage sharing and collaboration. It appeared late last year in the British Journal of Educational Technology:

Wheeler S, Yeomans P and Wheeler D (2008) The good, the bad and the wiki: Evaluating student-generated content for collaborative learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39 (6), 987-965.

This paper explores the potential for wiki-type open architecture software to promote and support collaborative learning through the use of student-created content. It delineates some of the affordances and constraints of wiki software as an open architecture that has the potential to facilitate collaborative learning through community-focused enquiry. It seeks to promote debate in this key area of development, and highlights some recent key contributions to the developing discourse on social software in what has been termed 'the architecture of participation'.

The second article was written from the same data, but this time with the emphasis on the use of wikis to promote quality academic writing. It was published in Learning, Media and Technology journal.

Wheeler S and Wheeler D (2009) Using wikis to promote quality learning in teacher training. Learning, Media and Technology, 34 (1), 1-10.

This paper discusses writing as a social practice and speculates on how wikis might be used to promote higher quality academic writing and support collaborative learning. This study of undergraduate teacher trainees' online learning activities focuses on how shared spaces - wikis - might be used to communicate ideas and generate course-specific content. The study also explored how students, through such activities, were able to improve their academic writing skills and engage more critically in learning. Data captured from student discussion boards and a post-module email questionnaire (n = 35) were used to map student perceptions of the usefulness of wikis in support of their academic studies. The data indicate that most students raised their skill level in writing directly to the publicly viewable wiki space, in sharp contrast to the more informal content they posted on the discussion boards. The scope of collaborative writing was limited due to students' reluctance to edit each others' work, but students appreciated the shared environment as a means of discussing their work and the content of the course. Students reported that their academic writing skills had improved through their formal participation in the wiki.

Learning with wikis

Today I sent back the corrected proofs for a new article due to be published next month in the journal Learning, Media and Technology. I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but LMT must be one of the most attractive journal covers I've seen. It's also a quality publication, so I'm delighted the article has been accepted. I co-authored it last year with my wife Dawn, who was working with me as an associate lecturer in Education at the University of Plymouth. She is now back in the secondary sector teaching English at Saltash.net Community School, but this is a nice reminder for us both of the research we did together looking at how wikis can be used to promote quality academic writing. The article is titled 'Using wikis to promote quality learning in teacher training' and the reference is below. I'm posting this here because some of my Twitter friends told me they wanted a heads up on the article before it's published. Here is is, and I hope it is useful...

This paper discusses writing as a social practice and speculates on how wikis might be used to promote higher quality academic writing and support collaborative learning. This study of undergraduate teacher trainees' online learning activities focuses on how shared spaces – wikis – might be used to communicate ideas and generate course specific content. The study also explored how students, through such activities, were able to improve their academic writing skills and engage more critically in learning. Data captured from student discussion boards and a post-module e-mail questionnaire (n=35) were used to map student perceptions of the usefulness of wikis in support of their academic studies. The data indicate that most students raised their skill level in writing directly to the publicly viewable wiki space, in sharp contrast to the more informal content they posted on the discussion boards. The scope of collaborative writing was limited due to students' reluctance to edit each others' work, but students appreciated the shared environment as a means of discussing their work and the content of the course. Students reported that their academic writing skills had improved through their formal participation in the wiki.

Wheeler, S. and Wheeler, D. (2009) Using wikis to promote quality learning outcomes in teacher training. Learning, Media and Technology, 34 (1), 1-10.

Getting the bloggers to write

We've been concerned for some time about the quality of essay writing here at the University of Plymouth. Last week my colleague Mark Townsend and I got together to talk, and we came up with the idea to combine blogs and wikis as an experiment to explore essay writing, and hopefully raise skill levels amongst our students. Here's the plan:

Mark and I are going to create a blogalogue (blog dialogue, get it?) about academic writing, including all the do's and don't's, common errors, and good things that we see in essays. Students will be invited to comment on our dialogue and ask questions, raise issues, or even tell us that we are completely barking. Whilst the dialogue is ongoing, Mark and I will actually create a live document within a wiki space, which students can also comment on, criticise and make recommendations about. On the wiki Mark will be writing in black text and I will be writing in blue and with the roll back facility, everyone will be able to track the progress of the paper as it evolves. (We may even publish it along with our commentary about the experiment). Using these two social tools, we hope to generate enough dialogue across the entire student groups to be useful for everyone who reads it.

If anyone has similar projects they are developing, or would like to try this idea out too, please send a comment to us. The blog, which we have called 'Black and Blue' is already up and running.