Collaborative Writing
For the research paper portion of this project, students engaged in collaborative writing, a concept first introduced to me in Troy Hicks (2009) book, The Digital Writing Workshop. Hicks (2009) suggests using collaborative word processors (such as Google Docs) to allow students to collaborate and track revisions (p. 46-48). When drafting their research papers, students shared a Google Doc with their group-mates and created drafts and revised using the Google Doc platform. For this paper, students engaged in "coauthored writing" which "blends the work of many writers into a unified voice" (p. 44). Hicks (2009) suggests several guidelines for helping students become comfortable with collaborative writing. They are:
- Open up discussion about ethical concerns related to individual authorship and one's responsibility to the group.
- Let students mess up documents and fix them (revert to previous versions).
- Make the social behaviors of collaboration (e.g., listening, asking open-ended questions, repeating ideas heard from others) transparent.
- Have each individual name her assets and liabilities as a group member and choose tasks for writing accordingly.
- Create a list of specific steps for the group and individuals to take.
- Have frank discussions about the nature of revision -- especially how some of the first-draft writing will be cut or significantly changed -- so no one gets offended.
- Examine and acknowledge changing group dynamics.
- Encourage participants to ask good questions and keep conversations going by moving beyond simple responses to writing and into deep discussions about revision. (p. 44-45).
Multi-Genre, Multi-Modal Writing
Another teaching pedagogy that was introduced in the ECI 520 class was multi-genre writing. Following the guidelines set forth by Tom Romano in his book Blending Genre, Altering Style, each student in ECI 520 created a multi-genre project about a topic of their choosing. While I did not incorporate multi-genre writing into the service learning project, those skills did come in handy when creating this design studio synthesis. Learning how to create and share information using multi-modal and multi-genre works has been useful to me as a student, and is a pedagogy which I have employed in my classroom with other projects. To view my own multi modal, multi-genre project, click here.