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.
