Mr. Sicilia’s Blog

Prompt: As the nature of information — and authorship — on the web shifts and changes, why is it important that we use web tools to engage students in collaborative writing processes as well as keep track of robust and ever-changing information?

It is important to engage students in collaborative writing processes using web tools for several reasons. The most important reason is to familiarize students with the word authorship. Students do not know that the nature of authorship is changing, and they will not understand what it means to plagiarize as a consequence unless they are taught that definition. By using internet tools in everyday classroom activities students can see firsthand what types of information is considered public and private, reliable and unreliable, and just become basically familiar with how this changing and expanding world of information and communication works. We cannot expect students to simply know how to behave on the web, nor to know how to use new information that they learn to form their own, educated opinion.