How Open Source Has Changed Your Writing - Reader Response
On an earlier post I asked readers to contribute to a presentation that I was preparing for the NJCEA Annual Conference. I had set up a web page (really, a wiki page) at disposablewebpage.com which was set to expire (dispose of itself) on April 7. I have archived the responses to my four questions from that page here.
There were 24 revisions made to the page (that includes 5 by me - see graphic at end of post). That may not be an overwhelming response, but I was very happy with the quality of the responses. (BTW, no vandalism or spamming was done - something that always comes up when you talk wikis to new users.)
Here what readers contributed about how open source has changed their writing.
AUDIENCE seems to be the area most affected. Access to publishing via the web and gaining a large potential audience has changed forever. We know that writing is a recursive process. We write, revise, publish (in some way), revise based on feedback, publish again and so on. That process has not gone away, but it certainly has changed.
The paper a student once wrote, gave to a teacher who was the only audience, got back with a grade and perhaps some feedback and then put aside is an old and poor model. The writing a student submits to a teacher via an online publication (perhaps a blog), that gets comments from the teacher, fellow students and a world audience is a new model. If that writer revises the piece or posts another piece based on the responses, then the model is truly recursive.
Here's one response that I'll earmark for Tim to respond to at some point: "...there are probably many underlying software products (Linux, I imagine) that power tools that I use online." I agree that the typical user probably has no idea of what is under the hood of the blog, wiki, web pages they are using.
I have added bold to portions of responses that I personally found interesting and used in my presentation.
BELOW ARE THE RESPONSES FROM THE PAGE AS OF 4/6/08
What open source writing tools do you use?
1. Moodle (discussion, blog & wiki tool)
2. Blogs (Serendipity PHP, Blogger, Wordpress)
3. Google web page creation
4. Writeboard http://writeboard.com/
5. Wikispaces, Mediawiki, PBwiki and Wikipedia itself
6. Tripod web page creator
7. Open Office
8. Kate (an open source GUI editor for Unix and Linux)
9. The commenting feature in MS Word is very useful in working with writers on drafts.
10. Notetaking and Pre-writing OS products such as FreeMind - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_notetaking_software for more information (HM)
11. Joomla - OS CONTENT Management System - very powerful tool http://joomla.org/ BTW, I deleted the Blackboard & WebCT line from this list - they are NOT open source! [Tom]
12. WebGUI is another OS CMS see http://www.plainblack.com/webgui but I'm not sure that a CMS is really a "writing" tool as much as it is a tool to manage writing (as in a web site)
How has it changed your writing process?
1. I no longer write on paper. In the past, I would use paper to compose a draft and then type the second version into a word processing program (e.g. Word), formatting and revising for the final version. Today, if I need to write a draft, I use a word processing program and then copy it to an open source tool, making final revisions. Word has taken the place of paper and the web is now substituting for Word.
2. I still write on paper a lot, but it doesn't feel finished until I type it or print it.
3. I am able to write on my local computer without being confined by a web page's online editor (like TinyMCE) and I'm still able to format and upload my content to the web.
4. I am far more likely to rewrite on the computer than I ever was using paper.
5. Students are more likely to carry writing over a sustained period of time by archiving drafts and returning to them, adding notes and addressing comments attached by a reader. (HM)
6. Besides the points mentioned above, the greatest change for me has been in publishing online. The sense of a world audience has changed the "reader" that I keep in mind while writing.
7. I start multiple pieces and always have several things in progress. I store my work online and access it from my laptop from many places. (Cheryl)
8. With the use of wikis, the concept of 'reader' and 'audience' has changed to collaborator, which in a fast-paced agile environment means that the writer (that's me!) is not always the expert user. Users will find ways to put the software you produce and write about to use in ways you never thought about, so although I may be the first user, I'm not anymore the expert user and I don't write the content like I am. In my writing now, for example, I query the user, ask for feedback, and engage the discussion about the software's use. I no longer write from the perspective of expert user - it's a significant change in tone, I think.
9. I agree with #5 in the AUDIENCE section that the discussion here is leaning towards open source (particularly in the tools responses) but not addressing how it directly affects writing. The greatest change for me in the past 10 years has been in the publishing online of writing. That has changed the way many of us write, our audience (we have one!) and what we write. [rtoomer]
10. I'm not knowledgeable enough about open source tools to know what impact they have had on my writing. My writing has been changed in many ways by the Web, blogs, wikis and even the spell check feature in my Firefox browser. But there are probably many underlying software products (Linux, I imagine) that power tools that I use online. Web 2.0 is an overused term (to the point of meaninglessness) but the greatest contribution of OS to writing might be the interactive, read/write, two-way nature of most OS projects. (Siad)
Has it changed WHAT you write?
1. I write more. It isn't necessarily better but it is more. My handwriting has become illegible!
2. I once aspired to be a fiction writer and I still love to dabble in that area, but I now write via blogs and web sites a lot of non-fiction (commentary, reviews, how-to, lessons etc.)
3. I find a lot of separation in what I'm writing and I'm not too comfortable with it ...
I write for an open source software project, and we still have help systems (in AuthorIT) and a User's Guide (FrameMaker to PDF), along with all the web stuff - blogs, wikis, forums, etc. I'm interested specifically in what we write because if the concept of open source projects is to open everything, but my help system and user's guide are not available to everyone, should I migrate those to web content instead? Not from the business aspect - I've got vociferous 'experts' telling me what to do there - but from the user and writer interaction. Should I 'open' my content to the world and if so, how? To my knowledge there are no tools that let me open up a database CMS for world-wide edits and compiling. Plus, the product we have is in Eclipse, which has no editing, compiling tools at all. I'd love to take part in this discussion. [Virginia]
Update: check out the Eclipse TW forum in Yahoo Groups (I can't paste the link here - the editor won't let me) for an interesting and relevant dicussion on the lack of Eclipse-based open source tools too. [Virginia]
4. Comments on my blog posts send me into directions I would never have pursued in my writing. (Cheryl)
5. If I were bound by proprietary word processing programs like Word, I probably would write more diatribes against the editor than subject-based online (or offline) content
6. I write very few actual manuals - only 1 now for the product I support. It's a User's Guide delivered as PDF. Now, I concentrate on Flash tutorials to demonstrate quickly how to use the product, usable and context-aware help systems, and wikis that get what I know about the use of a particular component out there, but engage the user in a discussion about best practices with that component. I deliver executable samples built into the product with dynamically loaded help and cheat sheets that step a user through a particular process. It's much more interactive and spot-on and geez, it's stretching what I learned in school too!
Has it changed the AUDIENCE for your writing?
1. Audience = the world
2. Specialized within the profession
3. Having a real (Net) audience makes me much more conscious of my writing - from spelling and mechanics to the message itself.
4. I get comments from people all the time and have created some interesting professional contacts through web 2.0 sites.
5. Though I agree with these comments, I contend that they are saying that the Internet has changed writing, but not necessarily open source products (though I suppose there's more to open source software used to run the Net than I'm probably aware of). (Cheryl)
6. The audience is now our collaborators, they contribute back to the open source project and they tell us how they use it - real world examples are right in our faces now.
7. #6 says what I planned on adding - using collaborative tools online (mostly open source wikis) has led me to be much more "open" in my approach to ownership of what I write (this is in a working/educational setting btw) and more open to changes from the original. It's liberating. (Joel)
8. For me, the greatest change has occurred in using open source tools to allow publication and collaboration because that has allowed my writing to find an audience. When you hear talk of "the long tail," I think of the audience that even niche subjects can find online. As with the movement in broadcasting towards narrowcasting that came with the cable industry, the advent of free and open blogs, websites etc. allows for the narrowcasting of writing. A blog receiving 100 hits a day may mean nothing to a site tracking usage (like Technorati or Alexa) but is a significant audience (particularly if they are returning readers) to someone who would be otherwise writing "for themselves." [Flores]
9. VIA Steve Hargadon's site at http://www.stevehargadon.com - "A New Publishing Revolution. The Internet is becoming a platform for unparalleled creativity, and we are creating the new content of the Web. The Web that we've known for some years now has really been a one-way medium, where we read and received as passive participants, and that required a large financial investment to create content. The new Web, or Web 2.0, is a two-way medium, based on contribution, creation, and collaboration--often requiring only access to the Web and a browser. Blogs, wikis, podcasting, video/photo-sharing, social networking, and any of the hundreds (thousands?) of software services preceded by the words "social" or "collaborative" are changing how and why content is created."
Has it changed how you teach students to write?
1. Students use blogs to post writing and obtain comments from classmates and the wider Net audience. At times, people they write about (authors, other bloggers etc.) in their posts have commented on the blog or contacted them.
2. Students write for each other. They look for feedback from each other as well.
3. Yes, students definitely take more care knowing their peers will be reading their words.
4. I have accumulated so many useful bookmarked sites, samples of writing and readings over the past 5 years - now I can easily make available online to my students. Pre-Net, most of that would have stayed in my file cabinets or gone out on handouts that never made it out of the classroom. Students do use the sites and tools I have made available to them.
5. Some of my students continue to write on the blog or web site after the course ends. That's a dream come true! (Now, if they would just keep reading.)
6. I have students in my "Issues in IT" course (an audience of non-writers) create accounts on Wikipedia and edit technical entries there. Generally, we find those entries very well done and accurate. Earlier I had created my own IT wiki & had students use it - but the limited audience did not provide anything like the community that Wikipedia offers them. They add worthwhile content and monitor the pages they edit for further changes. Interestingly, one student deliberately added incorrect content several times to see if it was corrected. It was - and his account was blocked from further editing! A sign that the community is being monitored. (Francis P)
7. My students mostly use the internal writing tools provided by Moodle. Since I teach a Unix certification class, most of the writing my students do are more of the form of a short paragraph rather than a lengthy essay.
8. I teach my students to use the tools and expect them to put some of their writing online for review and comment. I also feel I need to teach that this new open movement does not mean that copy/paste and plagiarism is now OK.
One contributor to the page went the extra mile and contacted me by email with some results of her own survey. I have written about that on an earlier post, but here is the most relevant comments from her survey to this topic.
1. Working on open source has affected me less than simply being a lone tech writer. Because I need to collaborate on documentation with non-techwriters, I choose tools and processes that are accessible to them. This is true whether I am collaborating with coworkers on a client project, or with outside developers or users on an open source project. (JS)
2. Working with volunteers has required more mentoring, leadership (not management), negotiation, and editing than when working with staff or contract writers. I've enjoyed the opportunity to write in "international English" and work with a talented group of people, many of whom do not have English as a first language. Balancing the varied writing styles of the volunteers with a need for some consistency in results has been challenging, and has reinforced my opinion that many things some editors obsess over are (and should be) far down on my priority list for getting usable documentation published. (JW)
3. Because the methods users currently use to access supporting content have changed so drastically with Eclipse plug-ins, I am (finally!) able to consider useful ways of presenting user- and task-centric content to the user in an interactive way. No longer is the divide between what the user is doing on the screen, and the help they need so wide - and the gap will close even further with the development of Eclipse and supporting products. So, while some users still seem to want a PDF they can print and study, most users are not willing to spend that amount of time. Instead, these users want and need useful, specific support for what they are trying to do right now. It has opened up the channels of user support and initiated writing a lot of different types of supporting content, which I believe would be difficult to manage without our content system. While we don't currently deliver our content as source the user can contribute to and compile, that day may come. (VO)
In case you're interested, this was the intro to the disposable page that I gave readers: I'm preparing a presentation for a conference on college English teaching hosted by NJCEA. Using my educational technology blog, Serendipity35, I've asked people to collaborate on the presentation here.
The presentation is titled "Open Everything: How the Open Source Movement Will Change Writing."
The event is on March 29 at Seton Hall University in New Jersey (USA), so I have set this page to expire on the April 6th as I want to use this page in the presentation.
My premise is that tools like Moodle, blogs, wikis, collaborative editing software, instant messaging and even podcasting change the way we write.
I'm thinking about writing for the web, but also about traditional pen/keyboard to paper writing, and how we now "publish" and present our writing.
I think most people would agree that the word processor changed how people write (revision, for example) and grammar/spell checkers have changed things (not always for the better) and our ability to be very easily published on the web has changed how we present our writing.
I thought I'd try this disposable page to reach out to those of you who write using open source tools or concepts, or teach using them.
Can you contribute anything to answering these questions (or come up with ones of your own)?
Click the EDIT tab at the top of this page to begin, enter the editing master key openwriting, then enter a name for yourself (real name or a pseudonym - most people have been identifying themselves after their addition) and have at it. Please share this post and the information to others who have any interest in writing and technology.
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