Disorganized Ruminations on Collaboration
I wonder if the concept of plagiarism should be revised itself, given the fact that so much of writing is in fact collaborative. From a practical standpoint, not fighting plagiarism can cause a freeloader problem where students do not pull their own weight and do not develop some of the more solo writing skills.
Hmm… are there any writing skills that are exclusively solo? I have a hard time brainstorming in groups and I come up with fewer ideas, though I remember a lot of students who came to the Writing Center (where I tutored) were able to generate a lot more ideas when the tutor asked them questions that encouraged further analysis. I’ve been told that writing is a solo activity and in some cases it really is, since two students cannot simultaneously write a particular text. But that seems to be the case with many other things as well. Yesterday I built a bookshelf with Joelle (I asked her if I could include this) and the whole process was collaborative overall. There were times when one of us would be hammering in a nail while the other was reading instructions. But there were some aspects of the project that were fully solo. For instance, there was no way that we could both hammer in the same nail at the same time. Writing seems to function the same way, with the overall process of writing being collaborative, while the actual acts of writing are not collaborative. Or are they? When forming an idea that incorporates information that you received from a group member, are you then collaborating?
Group Leadership
I wonder how leaders are formed in group projects. From my personal experience, there have been some group members who take charge of the project and try to get everything organized. Sometimes, the entire group is full of leaders and there has to be a great deal of negotiation over who does what, since no one really has a specific right over any other group member to decide what the group does. If the group is full of members who have different ideas on how the project should go, compromising, synthesis and weighing the pros and cons of each idea can help students decide how the project will be carried out. I always try to see if there is a way that each member of the group has roughly an equal percentage of ideas so that no one feels that they were ignored or that another group member dominated. Of course, this is only possible with group members who want to contribute. Group members who don’t take the initiative when contributing can be guided into the project by asking them what they think about different ideas, but not all group members provide feedback, maybe because they are afraid that their ideas will be scoffed at or will actually harm the project.
Purpose of Wikis
Wikis seem to be the most effective collaborative tools for very large projects that take a long period of time. In our group, I was thinking of setting up a wiki space on one of the free wiki servers, but I felt that our script would be so short that a wiki wouldn’t be necessary. But the larger the project and the more collaborative the project, the more useful I can see a wiki being. But there’s this anxiety over whether or not someone will ruin the wiki by providing irrelevant information or badly editing the wiki. I think wikis record changes made to the wiki so that bad edits can be changed back to their original entries, but the anxiety is still there.
The section in chapter 4 entitled “Using Wikis to Improve Reading Ability and Literary Interpretation” pointed out how students are less intimidated when they are editing the text of others. I can definitely see the editing of the entries of others to be effective in teaching students editing skills. Students usually seem to fear editing their own writing, so editing the writing of others might help them develop editing skills that they can eventually apply to their own writing process.
I like the idea of wiki course books since the multiple authors are more capable of challenging each other’s biases and providing a better-rounded picture of a particular subject. It is necessary that students carefully cite where they have received their information or how they came to the conclusions that they’ve arrived at.
Classroom 2.0 Limitations
In light of the last class we had, the ideas that Catherine McLoughlin discusses seem far removed from the realities of classrooms where administrators are aggressively seeking to prevent the full utilization of the Internet in the classroom. The only way that I can see educators actually preparing students for a wired world is to provide more protections to teachers so that they do not have to fear legal repercussions for classroom Internet usage.
I like your analogy of building the bookcase because just as two people wouldn't be hammering a nail at the same time, in most collaborative writing assignments, two writers wouldn't be writing a sentence together. If they were, it would become an awfully long and tedious writing task.
ReplyDeleteWikis do encourage collaboration at a much deeper level than other venues and also de-emphasize the authority (ego) of any single writer who contributes to the text.
But that isn't necessarily an easy task--for those who have to surrender that authority as participants and for someone who has to evaluate individual members, such as a teacher assigning a grade.
In one of her evaluation rubrics for multimodal text, Selfe lists, in addition to more familiar criteria, such as content, purpose, audience, multimodal affordances as a criteria--that is, asking if the author has effectively considered and executed these as part of the project. Obviously, this makes sense if you are going to evaluate a multimodal text.
By way of analogy, might we need something like that in an evaluation rubric for a wiki text--that is, something that measures the degree of "collaborativeness" of individual authors? How would/could we assess such a thing?
I have to admit that I cringe at the thought of trying to grade individual student's efforts at collaboration in a wiki. I realize that a teacher could access drafts and revisions, but deciding how to quantify that seems difficult. A rubric would help, of course, but there are all the variables of student ability, motivation, familiarity with technology, etc. that make grading a wiki much more complicated than a traditional essay. This doesn't mean that educators should avoid these tools, but they will need some hand-holding to figure out how to justify grades to their students and (in the case of high school) their parents.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the wiki course books. I found that to be an awesome idea for the classroom in order to shape a more concrete concept of how producing text and then refining it functions in actual work environments as well.
ReplyDeleteYou said it is a way in "challenging each other’s biases and providing a better-rounded picture of a particular subject." This is something I experience at work every day when we're coming up with promotions for my company. It starts off as a lot of talking, and then documented into alphabetic text, that is then handed over to a designer, who then hands it over to the next person and so on until the finished product is brought back to the beginning of the process again to be evaluated and then eventually presented to the public.
I sympathize with the overwhelming process of deciding how to actually designate a grade to individual authors' contributions to a wiki text. I can't imagine how one would justify a letter grade beside participation and the level of factual data or research put into creating a wiki.
Thank you for the compliment.
ReplyDeleteI think collaboration could be assessed by viewing the students in the act of collaborating,keeping track of how often each student participates and how willing students are to consider differing opinions. Students need to develop negotiation strategies within a group, whether it be by consensus or by vote (or some other means). Maybe the instructor could point out negotiation strategies that are acceptable and negotiation strategies that are never acceptable, such as bullying. Students could be assessed based on how often they use acceptable negotiation strategies (such as arguments using logos) and instructors could also give points for when students devise innovative negotiation strategies.