Ready for a challenge?
How will building collaboration into a writing course as its integral part change the pedagogy?
I believe that making collaborative writing projects a core of a writing class curriculum will have a number of both positive and negative impacts on the pedagogy, especially in the beginning. Collaborative projects are a huge challenge for both the teachers and the students. Most of my students, when they learn my course is built on collaborative projects, lose enthusiasm and confidence right away, because most of them, for some odd reason, had mostly negative group work experiences before. So, it takes me a while to scaffold that collaborative group work environment first before they actually feel confident in their groups and start understanding how to make the group successful. Collaborative writing projects may easily fail or cause distress within a classroom community. I had a class in which my friend and I were engaged into a collaborative project throughout the semester. the more we worked on it, the more we realized that we simply cannot write together, irregardless of our friendship. We tried different collaborative tools, including google docs, which is similar to wiki and Skype and face-to-face meetings. In the end, we hardly managed to put a number of quite illogical pieces together and get an "A", but none of us enjoyed the process, and the paper turned out completely unpublishable. Reflecting on this experience, I realize that we needed more help from the professor, more gradual scaffolding of collaborative writing projects on his part for his students, and some sort of tech. help (introduce us to google docs, for instance).
Thus, if a teacher undertakes such a challenge, he/she has to wisely redesign the class, building it on the foundations of collaborative community throughout the course, helping the students negotiate ideas in groups, discussing disagreements etc. But I do believe that making collaborative assignments the core of the curriculum is possible and can be a lot of fun, however, it is not as simple as it may seem to achieve the fun and good quality output of this collaboration.
How making all course public might change what students write?
Well, again, I think public writing might change the written works in any direction, depending on how public it is. If it stays within a classroom community, students' writing might become more open, genuine and sincere than it ever used to be. I witnessed a composition class here at IUP, in which students shared there quite personal stories with the rest of the class. They were given a choice of topic and warned that they would have to share, and they all chose to write about very personal matters,to my surprise. That class became a very strong community in the end of the semester. They still meet and spend time together, even though they are busy 19 year olds and it has been a year since they had that class together.
If public is widely public, accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web, then, it is hard to say how the writing will change. Based on what we see on social networks, it might not necessarily change towards less personal or private. With the development of technology it feels like the sense of private and personal is getting lost and the divide between public and private becomes more and more invisible. The quality of the research might improve if the writing is public, since more people have access to adding to the works. A writing classroom will become one big wiki,may be this is the way to create new knowledge and make progress today?
