From E-mail Exchanges to MOOCs

This roundtable addresses “ways in which future innovation always builds on past intellectual and material history” in the context of peer-to-peer learning in digital, networked, writing classroom spaces. Roundtable participants explore the evolving scope and scale of peer-to-peer online discussion in writing classrooms, presenting research from a range of contexts and tracing an evolution from intraclass email discussion groups in the early 1990’s, to global discussion boards in the late 2010’s, to student interaction in the 2013 Writing II: Rhetorical Composing MOOC. Together, panelists suggest a means of using what we have come to understand about how individuals and communities work to shape interfaces, texts, and technologies to develop pedagogy focused on advancing students’ abilities to build critical, productive, and ethical relationships in online discussions.