Collaborative Composition in the Digital Age: A Tale of Two Classes: A Teacher’s Reflection

So, what have we learned here? That’s the question that has plagued me ever since I conducted the collaborative assignments that I am putting on display for the 2010 CCCC workshop, Digital Media and Learning in a Social World.

In thinking more and more about collaborative writing, I have gone back time and again to various authors and experts on the subject and I found myself, in the month or so leading up to this conference, re-reading Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s 1983 essay, “Why Write…Together?” Toward the end of that piece, Ede and Lunsford pose a number of provocative and important questions about collaborative authorship, and a few of them stand out to me now that I am reviewing (yet again) the reflections of my students on their experience with multiple authorship and considering what I have to share about the process of assigning and evaluating a collaborative new media writing project. Ultimately, I think I can frame what I have learned about collaborative composition in the digital age around three of Ede and Lunsford’s questions.

 

Following Up

The walls are within the academy, not without.
(paraphrasing Barbara Ganley, Keynote: Ecotones and
Crossroads: Re-imagining the Spaces of Learning in an
In-Between Time, Computers and Writing,
June 19, 2009)

If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
(My revision of Andrew Sullivan, “Why I Blog”)

“[The diverse range of media we engage with] reward the capacity to make connections and to see patterns – precisely the kinds of skills we need for managing an information glut.”
(Jamais Cascio, “Get Smart/er“)

 

Credit Where Credit is Due

 

Justify My Blog

Anyway. First of all, we’ve got to address the question of what the term blog means. Is it a noun (a person’s blog, a blog post, a distinct genre, a mode, a format, a medium)? Is it a verb (to blog, an act, a practice, a process)? Is it both? I’d like to argue that it is both, following Danah Boyd’s injunction to scholars to “conceptualize blogging as a diverse set of practices that result in the production of diverse content on top of a medium that we call blogs.” Blogs can and do facilitate the production of many different genres. We’ve all seen blog posts that are essentially remediations of genres we are intimately familiar with from print: the personal essay, the news report, the academic argument (something this little blog text is looking like more and more!). Craig Saper notes that, in his correspondence with several academic bloggers, they often expressed a belief that blogging is merely one of a variety of legitimate options for writing and conducting research (of course, those are scholars who are already blogging, not the ones who are, at best disinterested in or, at worst, disdainful of, blogging). Thinking of them as a medium as Boyd suggests makes sense to me.

 

Sustainable Practice

Okay, I’ve been thinking about this. Lovink notes that The Financial Times pronounced the death of the blog back in 2006 (37). Granted, that may have been a bit premature, but you know how the media is – it loves a grand pronouncement! But Lovink’s clear-eyed look at what he terms the “nihilist impulse” in blogging suggests that if these discrete, like-minded communities that collectively comprise the blogosphere remain isolated in their echo chambers, then blogging might certainly lose its appeal and potential. Lovink states, “If the blog scene disintegrates, so too might blogs as technical platforms” (38).

Media constantly evolve, but I’d like to see blogs stick around because I actually do think they have potential and value for seriously scholarly work, but only if we start to think more about that work as process and practice rather than product. (And, BTW, you were right earlier when you said I was being provocative about that). I think blogs are currently under-theorized and that’s the key.

 

Forced Blogging=Zero Comments

Okay, let me try to explain my experience. I’ll use my Web writing classes from the past year as my examples since they are fresh in my mind and because they explicitly open the question of what function blogs (and other forms of new media writing) might serve in the halls of academe.

 

Doing it Bloggy-Style

I’ve been involved with blogging as a writing instructor for several years now and, having just finished another Writing for the Web course in which we spent a great deal of time and energy talking about blogging and how (and why) to write blogs, I find I am seriously questioning my ideas about blogs and blogging both as a teacher of writing and as a researcher and (sort of, sometime) blogger.

Here’s a question: What should I be teaching Web writing students about blogging, precisely? Bloggers like lists.