A Paper is Born
November 29, 2007If you had been wondering what happened to ol’ oakville boy over the past 20 days, most of you probably can guess. Besides marks deadlines, parent-teacher interviews, SAG and other life events, I have managed to finish my paper. Yeah!!!
Although given the experience, there wasn’t one piece of paper evident in the process (Ok, I lie…but more later). Creating the paper in Google Docs was quite an experience. I was quite leery about being able to create a paper in the way suggested, but I found that the tools were more robust than I thought and it wasn’t long before I was typing away with less trepidation. Speaking of which it has a decent spell checker built in and pretty much all the tools you need for a paper. Although I think WordPress has more options and a slicker interface – tell me if I’m wrong.
I have to admit though that I did slip into some old habits of printing out articles I was using for my paper and also using Word on my computer as a backup. I guess it is hard to give up old habits. Somehow not seeing actual page breaks on my document was not quite right since these things give you clues as to the length of sections and the pacing of your arguments.
What I did find really useful was the tracking revisions feature. As any teacher will tell you, many times students use the ol’ cut and paste method of essay writing to try and make their work a little less laborious and their own. By being able to track revisions, you can easily tell whether they have done a lots of cutting and pasting. Just that feature alone is worth using it. Instead of failing students who blatantly plagiarize and dealing with that rigmarole, get them to create their papers in Google docs where they can share their work with you and you can see the creation of their papers.
Given that feature I was a little worried that being able to peek in on our paper creation might taint the impression of the final product. All writers work a bit differently. I tend to organize well first then let it all flow from start to finish, whereas others just start writing and revise, move stuff scrap stuff and even start all over if things are going badly. However the approach, both extremes can result in excellent papers. If teachers think your writing approach is confusing or disorganized but the final product is fine, do they see your work differently? Sometimes it is indeed black magic that has resulted in some of my papers. It is the old analogy of sausage. Everyone likes sausage, but if you ever saw how it was made you might have a completely different opinion of it.
Anyway, my paper is about what I had talked about previously, that is, the inclusion of controversial technologies into the classroom. I specifically wrote about Facebook and cell phones. Because Facebook is so new, of course, it was hard finding peer reviewed articles on it. I however managed to conduct my own primary research using my students to gauge their thoughts on Facebook as an educational tool. I was pleasantly surprised at the maturity level of some students in recognizing its potential. Cell phone usage is an even harder one to crack since most high schools have an outright ban on their use in school. But I was also able to survey about that and discuss some productive uses for them.
All these document are readily available here:
Survey on Facebook with Results
I shouldn’t have to say this but… With respect to intellectual property rights, please do not freely distribute these documents. If you wish to distribute, post or publish or use these documents for other purposes, please ask my permission.
If you wish to use the blank survey above, by all means. I would actually be curious to see if anyone else would get similar results.
And by all means, please comment on the paper as I will be on yours.
Hey David,
Great paper. You should submit this for publication. I would suggest the ManACE journal for starters.
Hi David, That was an interesting idea to survey your students about Facebook and it was interesting to read the results. Good job on finishing your paper. I’m not going to read it until I finish mine. I never know what thoughts might creep into my head and then sneak onto my paper. It’s better for me to finish mine and then see how our conclusions compare. Different topic though. I sure agree about the difficulty of doing the research. I restricted my sources to academic journals and peer reviewed articles and I found many but unfortunately far too many of them wanted money and subscriptions before I could view more than the abstract. The more I’ve read the more issues I see as relevant and things have gotten out of hand entirely. I’ll share when I get done – I’m such an optimist. ;-P
Super Dave, I enjoyed your paper. It hits a lot of topics that everyone struggles with every day. I hope that we are able to employ these tools effectively in the classroom. How better to engage students in learning than by letting them use the tools THEY are comfortable with?
Given the current state of notoriety that Facebook has gotten lately, I’m not sure how this paper would come across to most teachers. However, from what I’ve seen too many teachers don’t even consider what kids are doing to include as part of their teaching to help engage students. Thanks for the Kudos.
Congrats David. I will read your paper later. I need to work on minwe so I will not be in touch for a couple of weeks. Talk later.
Congrats on the completion of your paper.
Well, I’ve finally read your paper David and a very fine paper it is. I enjoyed your topic and the references from the variety of sources that you researched. I think that what you say makes a lot of sense but I agree we’re not particularly close to a consensus on using these tools in the classroom. I actually think that it would be easier to implement the use of cell phones in a class than it would be to open up Facebook. Fortunately there are many social networking sites available for educators and we could even create our own Ning site. So you have some ideas for using cell phones with any of your classes?