Sara Jameson and I just got done collaborating on a talk for the TYCA-PNW conference, and we’re looking forward to possibly turning that into a paper, as well as collaborating on a talk for CCCC in the spring. On a similar note, Sarah B. and I got permission to collaborate on a paper for our Classical Drama class, which I think is really exciting. I’m pumped.
Lisa Ede sent me this link about why people don’t use collaborative tools. This is especially interesting after using Writely, now google docs. I don’t really have much to say right now about the resistance to collaboration, but I do think that the reasons that people don’t collaborate seem pretty accurate:
- Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns.
- Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
- The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they’re awkward.
- Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don’t solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
- The training materials for these tools don’t match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
- Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren’t online.
- Often we don’t even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we’ve discovered who the right people are, we’re likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
- We are not accustomed to learning with others. Traditional schooling rewards individual effort (e.g. you take the test by yourself).
I’ve been using Writely/Google all semester long with my students (basic writing) and yesterday we dove into the waters of writing collaboratively. Unfamiliarity, yes, I could see that yesterday as we developed our own rubric for an email peer review. The first thing I asked them to do was to type in their names, so that they could see what happens when everyone types to a common text, by and large this meant having to wait 2 microseconds. It was a test of patience while the names gradually appeared.
I’ll spare you a blow by blow, but there assignment for tomorrow is to copy and paste our class-generated rubric into a new document that also has a copy of a paragraph that we’ve been working on. Then, they are to “invite to collaborate” two other class members, whose emails they received by a random process involving index cards.
Once each student has completed the peer review, they are to send back the document to the peer and cc me. Do I expect this to go smoothly? Nope. I know that tomorrow I’ll be spending time talking and helping out individuals who are still thrown by it. I expect that even after we get through the assignment, they’ll still be confused and will gradually “get it” as we move towards the end of the semester.
It just takes time and patience.
Thanks for sharing, Joanna! I agree that much of this takes patience and perserverence. I hope it’s a success – and I’d like to hear more as the term continues.
Well. . .Writely’s move to Google has created more problems than I’ll list here. And at midterms! Anyhow, I’m moving the class over to another program whose name I’ve forgotten.