Date of Award

1-2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

English

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Melinda Knight

Committee Member

Jessica Restaino

Committee Member

Daniel Bronson

Abstract

Teaching writing by employing the tools made available by Web 2.0 technology allows students to meet the changing educational requirements for writing with technology. This paper argues that the wiki is a facile tool for teaching academic writing at the college level. It theoretically and pedagogically situates the wiki in a threedimensional rhetorical context. This paper also demonstrates how and why the wiki functions as a collaborative writing tool adhering to a socially constructed view of knowledge. As a constructive hypertext, wikis can be used to teach, clarify, reinforce, and deepen many fundamental writing skills. This paper reviews the body of literature which connected a metacognitive approach with process-to-product writing for transformational learning. Research studies concluded that composing with hypertext facilitates metacognition, transformational learning, and collaboration and that a social constructivist view of knowledge, control, and power establishes the dialogic nature of digital rhetoric regarding both participation with and decision-making about the audience in a three-dimensional rhetorical situation constituted through logic, dialect, and rhetoric. My research supported the hypothesis that the wiki is a facile tool for teaching a metacognitive approach to process-to-product writing and transformational learning at the college level.

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