Examples of the Process

I have selected eight examples of the reflective process to illustrate my students' metacognitive activity. The MOO logs represent the students' "reflection in action" as they read, type, and communicate in real time on the MOO, and perhaps more overtly, they show the students' "reflection on action" in the form of both handwritten marginalia on the logs and reflective paragraphs written after the annotating process. The students and tutors involved have given consent to their work being used in this article.

The MOO logs from Amanda and Flipper are transcripts of MOO-based tutorials. Both students were in the process of writing a paper focusing on a person or event, and that subject's influence on its respective community. The tutors had read rough drafts of the students' papers before beginning the writing conference.

Chris , Anne , and Mindy's logs are from MOO conferences with me, their teacher, during the process of writing a persuasive paper for a specific audience. I read a draft of each student's paper before our conference, and we met on the MOO to discuss the work.

Finally, Janet, April, Cathy's logs come from a peer collaboration day, which our class refers to as "Oreo Day." All of these MOO logs are the same transcript--the peer conference is between these three students. However, the annotations in the margins and the post-conference reflections are those of each individual student. During the discussion, the students discuss Janet's paper, which is the same subject/community paper that the tutorial students were writing.

After each MOO conference took place, I printed the logs of the sessions for each student and asked them to write, in the margins of the papers, their responses to what happened online. Though I left this assignment somewhat vague, I suggested that they highlight, underline, or circle points in the logs that seemed particularly important, and I asked that they converse with the log, noting what they were learning or thinking online, what they are thinking about as they read back through, and how they envision the logs shaping their revision processes.

For presentation here, the MOO logs appear on the left of the screen, and the students' annotations appear in green print on the right. Further, when a student underlined, circled, or highlighted part of the text of the conversation, that text is green and underlined here. For example, this is how an annotated log appears in this webtext.

This text represents conversation during an online conference.This is also online conversation, but it has been underlined or highlighted by the student during annotation.

This text represents comments that the student wrote in the margins during annotation.

After the students finished revising their papers after the MOO activities, I asked them to write reflections on how they felt the online activities influenced their revision processes. Those reflections are linked at the top of each of the annotated MOO log links.