VOLUME 1 • ISSUE 1
Special Edition
April 2011
collaborative writing FEATURES: • What is Collaborative Writing? • Why use Collaborative Writing? • Collaborative Tools • Writing in the Real World
Writing
Together Better
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Collaborative Writing Defined
Lisa M. Russell
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Why Wikis? Jason Burge
WHAT IS IT?
4 Blogging
Megan Cribb
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Google Docs
Sean Zearfoss
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Earliest Collaboration
Lisa M. Russell
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Collaboration in the Classroom
Kiran Damaris
Collaborative writing in the writing classroom may result in richer and more complex writing experience. They can be organized by the teacher with clear roles defined (leader, facilitator, listener, encourager, etc.) Or a collaborative writing project may be assigned that has little instruction or guidance forcing students to come up with the roles and responsibilities. According to the Writing Across the Curriculum Clearing House at Colorado State University, Collaborative-writing assignments may not work for every writing assignment, “nor should they all. But at least some of the writing students do works best in collaborative groups.”
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CONTENT
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Collaborative Writing
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“I believe that all writing is collaborative. No matter what you’re doing, even if you’re sitting by yourself at your computer you’re collaborating with somebody, something you’ve read, or some voices you’ve got in your head, or your friends, or something, there’s some kind of collaboration going on.” Andrea Lunsford
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WHY WIKIS?
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in a closed classroom setting now becomes available to the online and academic communities at large (45).
Meishar-Tal, Hagit and Gorsky, Paul. “Wikis: what students do and do not do when writing collaboratively.” Open Learning (2010): Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 25-35. 3
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Devoss, Danielle Nicole, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks. Because Digital Writing Matters. 1st ed. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass: A Wiley Imprint, 2010.
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Works Cited
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As advantageous as this kind of writing is, it offers its own set of challenges that require careful supervision and guidance in a classroom setting. In an in-depth study by Hagit Meishar-Tal and Paul Gorsky on how students participate in collaborative writing spaces, it was found that certain personality traits and learning styles tend to have an impact on what kind of contributions students gravitate toward in terms of: adding, deleting, content movement, wording, links, formatting, lingual and grammatical changes, and how often or how willing they were to make changes (32). This suggests that each student may benefit differently from the project, and that it may require a close examination of some of these tendencies to improve the learning experience for the individual student. Jason Burge
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Wikis offer a unique chance for students of all ages to participate in the global conversation of shared information and knowledge. By contributing to an online wiki, research once done
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Perhaps the most significant advantage a student receives from working in such online environments is in the opportunity to have their work available in the democratic marketplace of ideas. Devoss et al. concur:
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With the emergence of collaborative online workspaces in a global community and an emphasis on shared knowledge in the development of complete information resources, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of learning to adapt to and thrive in these environments, or the necessity of the academic community’s embrace of pedagogies surrounding this unique new rhetoric. As online learning, international business, and wikis of all kind become part our socio-cultural dialogue, preparing students to benefit from and contribute meaningfully in these spaces is of critical value.
BLOGGING
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Blogging offers several interesting opportunities for collaborative writing, allowing students to incorporate images, video, and sound into their writing, moving composition beyond simple text. Additionally, there is the appeal of possible self-publication, giving their writing an audience beyond their classmates and their instructor, and giving instructors the opportunity to teach students how to use basic multimodal media tools and audience awareness.
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There are several blogging sites that could be useful tools for collaborative writing, with Blogger and Wordpress being among the more popular free sites. Both of these sites offer many professional looking layouts and allow for personalization within each post, which could make students’ contributions unique to that student. Additionally, instructors can reserve administrator status for themselves, with students having the ability to create as many blog posts as they like without touching other students’ work.
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Blogger requires that you log in with a google account. If students do not already have a gmail account, Blogger creates one for them. Once this is done, an administrator, preferably the instructor, creates a blog and invites others students to
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contribute as members. Team member status will allow students to create and edit their own posts, without editing other’s posts or adding members. Wordpress also allows multi-author blogging. An administrator sets up a blog and invites others to be contributors, administrators, editors, or authors. It is tied to each contributor’s email address, but it does not require that each student have a gmail account. This would allow students to attach this blog to whichever email they check most often. Megan Cribb
GOOGLE DOCS
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Sean Zearfoss
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Unlike some alternatives for collaborative online writing, with Google Docs, there is no need for students to visit a separate website, set up additional profiles or passwords, or learn a complicated program, which all serve to encourage them to access the program and write collaboratively. Finally, there is literally no learning curve with Google Docs; if someone can use Microsoft Word, they can use the program. With the added ease of using the product, students can perhaps enjoy collaborative writing more and actively engage with one another more often.
collaboration to your existing systems without adding servers, software, or maintenance.” All of these applications can be accessed and shared from Gmail just as Google Docs is, and therefore, can aid in organization of projects, sharing of resources, and a kind of multimodal collaboration.
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The beauty of Google Docs is that, after obtaining an individual Google account, students can easily share writing assignments with anyone (who also has a Gmail account, of course) for the purpose of brainstorming, cowriting, peer response, or publishing. Further, students do not have any “wait time” to write on the document; composing and editing is synchronous. In other words, a document in Google Docs can be written on at any time by anyone accessing the document; multiple writers can author a document simultaneously with all the changes being
saved every few seconds. There is no need to email a document back and forth while individuals update or replace their personal copies of the documents.
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Google Docs is an excellent program for online collaborative writing. Only requiring a Google account to use, the free, online composing and document viewing program is easy to access and even easier to compose with. Unlike traditional word processing programs such as Microsoft Word or Open Office, Google Docs allows for simultaneous collaborative writing on an assignment from any computer at any time.
As noted on the Google Edu Overview Statement, “Google Apps gives your campus the power to securely create, share, communicate, and collaborate from any web browser. With Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video, Google brings 5
EARLY COLLABORATIVE WRITING
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Collaborative writing as we know it today may not be as “new” as we think. Robert Williams, curator emeritus of the Bentley Rare Book Gallery at Kennesaw State University explains that old manuscripts that have marginalia (margin notes) are often more valuable than text with no scribbles on the page. He explains that the marginalia starts a conversation that continues today to anyone who reads that book with the margin notes. The writer and the note taker work collaboaratively to add to the text. Popular in the 1800s as evidenced by the markings in Mark Twain’s extensive book collection.
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Twain may have loved collaborative writing and would certainly be on Facebook. He wrote “dude” in one of his margin notes. One Twain blogger wrote: “Mark Twain used the word ‘dude’? You wouldn’t think that Mark Twain would have been the dude type, but he did use the term. In his marginalia in More Tramps Abroad he writes, “Oh throw this dude out.” Elizabeth Clark in “The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st –Century Pedagogy” compared the digital age to the way “Gutenberg’s invention interrupted the rich tradition of interaction with a text.” The old manuscripts had margin notes that made the book a collaborative piece, but the printing press changed that by putting the book into the hands of many. We have come back to collaboration because of
digital writing. The collaboration among students produces valuable resources that add to the original. As in the old manuscripts, Clark observes, “sometimes the marginalia becomes as important as the original text.” (Clark) The strength of adding a collaborative element to a course design to a traditional framework is a valuable and available final product students will refer to long after they sold the books back to the bookstore.
was Mark Twain having a one-way conversation with the author. Twain made this book interactive for future readers.
In a climate controlled vault in the Newberry Library in Chicago there is an old publishing book titled “The Pen and the Book.” The Margin has a penciled-in note: “nothing could be stupider.” The scribbler
(E. A. Poe in U.S. Mag. & Democratic Rev. 15 484/1 )
Edgar Allan Poe had marginalia in his books. He even wrote a chapter in a book about the subject. He explained marginalia:
The marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburden itself of a thought.
Sounds like a blog to me.
Lisa M. Russell
SUCCESS OR FAILURE BOOK SHELF Collaborative writing is becoming increasingly common in academic settings. There are many positives and negatives that one should be aware of when working with collaborative online writing programs. F O R M O R E
In “Coping with the Problems of Collaborative Writing,” an article written by Richard Chisholm, he states, “There are pushy, dominant personalities. There are slackers and sluggards who need to go to the ant. Underachievers and overachievers, eager enthusiasts and resisters-the range is broad and rich with problems. And all of them, all types, agree on one thing: they always need more time.” Collaborative writing presents students with an opportunity to work closely with their peers. Some students place a low priority on collaborative projects, while others tend to “take over. This can cause the project to fail, as students may not be able to work collaboratively as envisioned by the teacher.
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Professors must think the project through and give students specific guidelines on how to work collaboratively. Chisholm later states in his article, “We can best meet the problems, I think, by planning the project well, explaining the plan, and helping students think problems through ahead of time and plan strategies to deal with them. What we need are appropriate procedures: how we plan the project, give the assignment, train students, monitor their work, give opportunity for groups to work together, encourage participation, and evaluate the processes and products.” This step taken by the professor will assist the students in the collaborative project.
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As professors include collaborative writing in their classrooms, it is essential that they equip students with details on how to work coherently. There are some situations that students may have to work with on their own when it comes to working with others, but this method will enable them to work collaboratively in the professional field. Kiran Damania Chisholm, Richard. “Coping with the Problems of Collaborative Writing.” Colombia State University, Aug. 1990. Web. 03 Apr. 2011. <http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol2/chisholm. pdf>
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Masters of Arts in Professional Writing Spring 2011 PRWR 7900 Digital Communications in the Writing Classroom Dr. Laura McGrath Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, GA 30144
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