"In a shorter project, undergraduates in a first-year writing class at Michigan State University were asked to keep a diary of the writing they did in any environment, whether blogging, text messaging, or gaming. For each act of writing over a two-week period, they recorded the time, genre, audience, location, and purpose of their writing.
'What was interesting to us was how small a percentage of the total writing the school writing was,' says Jeffrey T. Grabill, the study's lead author, who is director of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State. In the diaries and in follow-up interviews, he says, students often described their social, out-of-class writing as more persistent and meaningful to them than their in-class work was.
'Digital technologies, computer networks, the Web — all of those things have led to an explosion in writing,' Mr. Grabill says. 'People write more now than ever. In order to interact on the Web, you have to write.'"
On the one hand students write more, but on the other, as Mark Bauerlein notes, citing "the reading and writing scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have remained fairly flat for decades. It is a paradox, he says: 'Why is it that with young people reading and writing more words than ever before in human history, we find no gains in reading and writing scores?'" I suppose one could ask, even if students are doing more are they doing enough? And, where does the feedback come from to make them try to write better?
