But, especially with technical documents, collaboration is the way writing is often done. And there are many benefits: writing is made explicitly social, the classroom is more verbal and students become more engaged, I don’t get burnt out on reading 55 assignments and instead get the pleasure of reading 15-20 assignments.

When I was an undergraduate, I hated working in groups. It meant relying on other people (I was and still am a bit too much of a rugged individualist), working around schedules (I was always so busy), and sometimes me having to re-teach the material that others didn’t get. Now, I love collaborating. I’ve had a number of successful collaborative efforts: Luke and my workshop at a conference, Sara and my talks at a couple conferences, Heather and my LGBT studies class, Sarah and my paper for a course last year. These were all fun, and I learned a lot from those I worked with and from the process itself.

And I’ve become sold on incorporating it in the classroom. This term I’m stealing an assignment from another instructor: the group policy manual. It seems like a great way to start off the collaborative work because it explicitly asks the students to create guidelines for their collaboration and clear expectations for each other. And, at least from the work I’ve seen students do in class, because writing this document requires discussing various aspects of group work and coming to an agreement, I am not seeing the most common problem I usually see in collaborative writing: one person carrying the majority of the weight.

Now, if only our quarter system was a semester system…

So, I’m excited to show my students some online software they can use to collaborate or research with while they work on their proposals and group reports/projects/presentations. It should be a fun class period tomorrow, except perhaps while we’re talking about academic honesty… I haven’t really covered it yet in class, and it looks like I should have. I had a few students not quote properly in their last assignment — as in, they didn’t use quotation marks or even note that it was a direct quote. I don’t think it was intentional (er, well, malicious), but it was obvious in a few cases it wasn’t their own words. Luckily, though, they get a chance to revise when they turn it in for their individual portfolios, and this gives us a great chance to have a conversation about academic conventions and workplace expectations. (The assignment is graded informally.) It also gives me a chance to think about transfer and how I made a very poor assumption that some of the skills covered in first-year composition would transfer over well to other forms of writing in other classes.

Now, it’s off to get a few hours of sleep.

• Konrad Glogowski posts about his own voice in blogs while teaching 8th grade. I found his post really interesting in regards to personal voice and identity presentation/representation. An excerpt:

What I am really concerned about, however, is my own voice. For the past three years, my three successive grade eight classes enjoyed blogging and created successful and engaging blogging communities. Most of the time, this development took place without me. While I certainly encouraged my bloggers, discussed their work in class, and posted comments to involve my students in instructional conversations, I have always been absent as a person. This year, I want things to be different.

This year, I want my personal voice to be present in the community. I will, of course, continue to be present as Mr.Glogowski, the grade eight Language Arts teacher. I will be present in my didactic and supportive role of an educator, of a classroom teacher who guides and explains. At the same time, I want to be present as Konrad Glogowski, the human being who has his own interests and views. I want to be present as an individual, not an individual reduced to one role.

In other words, I want the students to see me as yet another blogger in their community, as someone whose reason for being there is not only to support and instruct but also to learn. To learn from and with my students.

• Via Blogging Pedagogy, among many others, Google has made a video explaining Google Docs:

• Clancy posted some interesting images on Kairosnews with visual representations of online arguments. Good for discussion prompts. Here’s an example:

“our task must involve engaging students in conversation among themselves at as many points in both the writing and reading process as possible, and that we should contrive to ensure that students’ conversation about what they read and write is similar in as many ways as possible to the way we would like them eventually to read and write. The way they talk with each other determines the way they will think and the way they will write” (422).

Bruffee proposes that the most important writing that students should do in first-year composition is “normal discourse,” or writing for a community of peers, such as one would in a job or in an academic discipline (424). I think it’s important to be able to write to peers, but I also have to wonder about the ability to write to those with more power, especially in a hierarchical society where most of our students (women, minorities, queer folk) will always be writing to people who have more power (even if the context has been “depoliticized”).

Richard Rorty’s concept of “abnormal discourse” seems pretty interesting – that an outsider to a community comes in and doesn’t know the conventions, so can’t speak or write “normal discourse” and is instead read as “either ‘kooky’ (if he loses his point) or ‘revolutionary’ (if he gains it)” because it doesn’t sound rational to those in the discourse community (429, quoting Rorty).

Sometime over the last year I read a critique of Bruffee’s social constructionism, but I can’t remember where it was…

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 415-436.

I also re-read these two Berlin articles today:

Berlin, James A. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.“ Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 255-270.

—. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.“ The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook. 4th ed. Ed. Edward P.J. Corbet, Nancy Meyers, and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 9-25.