Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia

by Robert E. Cummings

Overview

Focusing largely on the controversial website Wikipedia, Cummings explores the challenges confronting teachers of college writing in the increasingly electronic and networked writing environments their students use every day. Rather than praising or condemning that site for its role as an encyclopedia, Cummings instead sees it as a site for online collaboration between writers and a way to garner audience for student writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826516169
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2009
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Robert E. Cummings is the Director of the Center for Writing and Rhetoric and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Commons-Based Peer Production and the Composition Classroom 11

2 A Wikipedia Writing Assignment for the Composition Classroom 53

3 CBPP in the Composition Classroom: Case Studies 88

4 Inserting CBPP into Composition and Rhetoric Theory 123

5 The Origins of the Lazy Work Ethic and CBPP 162

Conclusion: Digibabble Digested 185

References 191

Index 195

Editorial Reviews

"For those who value such a collaborative platform and students' rights to a traditional liberal arts education but are insecure with new technology, this book offers clear pedagogical grounding in theory, history, and tradition - and then gives practical collegial help."
--from the citation for the MLA's Mina P. Shaugnessy Prize for an outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, or literature with strong application to the teaching of English.

Informed, smart, incisive, this book explores the radical hypothesis that the Wikipedia movement, too often linked with declining standards of credibility and correctness, could teach English composition faculty something they don't know about "higher education, making knowledge, and teaching writing". Cummings succeeds with marvelous skill at this delicate task. He offers teachers a way to connect the "'disconnected' core courses of composition to a real, authentic, knowledge community" and to provide new audiences for students' writing. Cummings' passion for this task is great, and his advice is sound. Your writing class may "never be the same," he notes, after you read this book-and, by the end of volume, you realize just how right he is.
--Cynthia L. Selfe, Ohio State University, author of Global Literacies and the World Wide Web

From the Publisher