Collaboration and Teaching: Using Social Networking Tools to Engage the Wisdom of Teachers

By JoeMoxley and Ryan T. Meehan

Compositionists (and academics in general) like to theorize about collaboration, yet how often do we collaborate? Are the curriculums of university writing programs collaboratively constructed by the faculty who teach in them or imposed by writing program administrators? Are writing programs using writing tools to faciliate collaboration about pedgagogy, program polices or desired program outcomes? Are writing programs engaging "the wisdom of crowds," the creative energy and decision-making power of groups of individuals to create content and arrive at pedagogical practices?

Back in the early 1980s Kenneth Bruffee called on composition instructors to value collaborative learning. Creating a learning environment steeped in a strong sense of community could, he theorized, help students develop intellectually and inspire them to join the "Conversation of Mankind." For decades compositionists have faulted our overreliance on a solitary, Platonic, Romantic view of the isolated writer in the garret. Compositionists no longer see knowledge as a god-given gift but rather as the culmination of a multitude of social forces that push on individuals, that define who we are, what we think is possible, and who we want to be. Thanks to the "social turn" in composition, we literally have a tsunami of books and articles articulating the interplay of language, culture, and the social construction of knowledge.

Yet what really goes on in our classrooms and writing programs?

If you visit the writing programs websites for universities with outstanding graduate programs in rhetoric and composition, would you see "brochureware" (i.e., "monologic sites that primarily provide information about an academic unit, with strongly limited feedback or contributions from those who are represented by the site" (Spinuzzi et. al) or would you see interactive websites that enable graduate students and other teaching faculty to revise and compose the curriculum? If you examined our curriculum and practices, would you see us engaging students' passions for social networking sites, or would you see us prohibiting these sites (as the University of New Mexico and Kent State have done) or would you see us mostly ignoring social networking sites, blogs, and wikis, focusing instead on the time-honored essay? How have we modified our practices to account for our increased sensitivity to the underlying social nature of our literacy efforts? When push comes to shove, have our classrooms evolved along with our understanding of the collaborative nature of learning and literacy? Are our classrooms empowering students to use technology tools to collaborate--i.e., to practice contemporary literacies? In a climate of decreasing financial support for higher education, how have universities kept pace with new writing tools that facilitate collaboration, from Tablet PCs to wikis to blogs? While we may all agree that writing technologies have fundamentally changed writing processes and assumptions about literacy, would an analysis of writing classrooms and/or composition textbooks suggest any major changes have occured in writing, especially collaborative writing or collaborative teaching, over the past twenty years?

Before outright rejecting our questions as hyperbole, as rhetorical strawmen, let's consider the facts. Yes, we know that peer review has become de rigueur for writing programs. We know that students are occasionally required to coauthor essays. We acknowledge some important deep changes have transformed our practices (e.g., various electronic peer review tools or online research or peer-group reviews of student papers). And we recognize it has become commonplace for scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition to coauthor scholarly works (although our colleagues in literature remain primarily tied to the humanistic tradition of privileging solitary works). Additionally, we understand that the Computers and Composition community, especially readers of Kairos, are leading the way when it comes to using wikis, blogs, and other content management tools to engage the collective wisdom of knowledge makers in our community.

Despite these important changes, we also believe there remain major social, interpersonal, and technological obstacles to acknowledging or valuing collaborative work in academic settings. Back in 1994 Lunsford and Ede conceded that "collaborative learning theory has from its inception failed to challenge traditional concepts of radical individualism and ownership of ideas" (431). Old habits die hard. Changing individual behavior is problematic, but changing systems is even more problematic. While the academic reward system has clearly been under scrutiny for decades, the single authored book or essay remains the coin of the realm. Hence, graduate students, adjuncts, and faculty are still motivated by individual accomplishment rather than collaborative efforts. The same values, the same focus on competition, guide the work of our students. As Smit, Heller, and other critics of collaborative learning have pointed out, students are motivated by competition for the holy grail of academe, the grade. Hence, it is not uncommon in our composition classrooms for students just to subdivide the work of group projects. And we are also aware of critics who argue that there is no empirical evidence that there is a "collaborative model of inquiry," that we lack empirical measurements that indicate that collaboration matters (Heller). And, almost ironically, we are aware of critics who depicted ways in which collaboration can be counterproductive, that the value of collaboration has been overstated, that we need to teach students to think independently, to fight the "shadow" of "dominant culture and its privileged kinds of subjectivity" (Heller 306).

While there are exceptions (particularly if you look at the work at compositionists with interests in computers and writing), the message regarding the nature of writing at all levels of education is clear: It is a solo effort. Teachers close their classroom doors and teach as they always have: privileging individual effort. Coteaching and collaborative projects are the exception, not the norm.

We need look no further than the standardized tests that determine how swiftly a student will move from one level to the next. These types of tests are prevalent during the formative years of one's primary education. The same type of testing continues through high school, culminating in perhaps the most important test of all, the SAT, which can have a major influence on whether a student can gain acceptance into a 4-year university. And now, thanks to U.S. Department of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, we can anticipate similar tests in higher education. For instance, the Florida Board of Governors has made clear its intention to incorporate standardized assessment at the university level. While the pejorative "college FCAT" isn't, perhaps, the best way to describe it — students would be evaluated through tests, essays, portfolios and interviews — such a program clearly favors individual effort and shuns collaboration. And while the credibility of standardized writing exams have repeatedly been called into question, college graduates looking to pursue graduate or professional degrees must endure one last standardized exam in the GRE, which contains a written portion.

Clearly, society (and its educational systems) reinforces the solitary writer as the prototype, yet outside of Composition, outside of academia, communities are exploring new ways to collaborate, to construct knowledge, in truly revolutionary ways. The realization of collaborative theory has been largely made possible by increasing connectivity to the Internet around the world. As accessibility to the World Wide Web grows, so does the "conversation."

Where collaboration thrives

Perhaps the greatest example of collaborative knowledge building comes from Wikipedia, the user-run encyclopedia launched in 2001 that is approaching 1.5 million English language articles. Topics in Wikipedia are subject to change by any user who happens to be on the site. By simply clicking the "Edit" button at the top of the page, readers becomes co-authors, contributing a new section or modifying an existing one. Once thought to be a recipe for disaster, Wikipedia's open nature has led to an encyclopedic resource that rivals their multi-volume, hard-cover counterparts. Opponents to Wikipedia often cite its "anything goes" philosophy as its weakness, and indeed, Wikipedia is not free of errors. But one need look no further than the site's entry on baseball to truly grasp how Wikipedia's collaborative forces have created a constantly updating document about one of the world's most famous sports.

While Wikipedia is perhaps the best showcase of collaborative writing, other knowledge-building communities have harnessed the power of the Web to "emerge." In 2005, "social news" emerged as a wholly new way to digest current events. One particular site, Newsvine.com, which launched in March 2006, promises to revolutionize the process of news creation and consumption as its users are responsible for the site's content and layout. Readers "seed the vine" with news stories they have read on the Web, while other readers vote for submitted stories they deem important. The real-time voting results dictate the placement of stories on the front page and various sub pages. In addition, Newsvine.com readers are given a personal space where they are encouraged to write columns, which are treated just like real news stories. Occasionally, well-written op-eds will make their way to the front page of Newsvine.com, where they share the limelight with the more typical mainstream sources. Chat and comment features accompany each entry, and important stories are usually followed by discussions that can exceed hundreds of comments from readers. The effect, taken all together, is a wholly collaborative online newspaper.

Other social news sites, such as CommonTimes and Digg, take a similar democratic approach, the latter recently falling into the top 100 visited web sites in the world, having launched just over a year ago.

Music, too, has become subject to the power of collaboration. Web sites like MacJams.com and iCompositions.com encourage musicians to work together, and they do. "Virtual bands" put out classified ads on discussion forums that seek instrumentalists or vocalists, and once assembled, the individual band members record their contributions and pass them onto the next member, who oftentimes live in a different state or country. Once every band member has contributed, the tracks are combined to create one coherent song. In many cases, it's hard to believe that the virtual band musicians didn't record together in the same studio.

Outside the realm of academia, social networking is providing the glue to hold collaborative creation processes together. People who write, or play music, or report news in these environments have incentive to produce good work. Should they fail to do so, their work will fall into obscurity. At Newsvine, writers who generate lots of comments (read: lots of discussion), have their subsequent articles published to more prominent places on the web site, like the front page, where it shares the spotlight with major national and international news stories. At MacJams, good songs get similar treatment.

Our experiences with collaborative tools

As compositionists, we can learn from encyclopedic enthusiasts, musicians and news junkies who are testing the limits of new literacy tools. We need to revise our courses and practices to better account for the demands of new collaborative literacies. Because environments like the ones we listed above thrive all over the Internet, we should encourage our students to write in them; we can use social networking tools to move away from the "teacher as examiner" audience and the arhetorical, busywork that has undermined our efforts. Within communities like the ones described above, students can write documents for tangible audiences, which can often lead to a greater sense of accountability on the part of the author.

In the early 80s, Bruffee suggested that knowledge was constructed collaboratively, but he probably never conceived of the ways new writing tools would transform collaborative practices. Today, collaboration vacillates like a large ocean wave: occasionally its outer rings kiss the shoreline and give us a glimpse into the future, but like all waves, collaboration all too often recedes in the face of dissenters who see it as a threat to authorship and copyright. The collaborative wave, empowered by social networking communities that democratically construct and create knowledge, is today challenging the traditional notion of the solitary writer.

At the University of South Florida we have been exploring how we can use collaborative tools to engage approximately 90 writing instructors in an online effort to develop our curriculum, a curriculum that is offered to approximately 9500 students each year. For the past four years, we have experimented with a variety of software tools, including Sharepoint, Flexwiki, and Community Server (for blogs and discussion forums designed to facilitate collaboration and social networking). We have characterized our work as datagogical. By this we mean that we are exploring how "databases" can inform our "peda gogies."

At CollegeWriting.us we are using Microsoft Sharepoint Services to engage the teachers who teach in our program each year in an effort to encourage collaborative curriculum development. The surprising result here is a collaborative focus, opening the classroom door to the world. Individual instructors are collaborating to share resources, develop assignments, and share student writing. Now three years old, this collaboration writing environment has empowered instructors to dialogue about effective practices and to show innovative writing assignment and resource.

At WritingWiki.org" we are collaborating on articles and beginning an effort to create an online classroom that would serve as a medium for students to post their work and conduct peer review. Here, too, in time we would like to develop a free online rhetoric. This wiki, like other wikis, challenges students to explore new ways to collaborate online.

At Teaching Wiki we are theorizing about teaching practices and collaborating on pedagogical articles. We see this space evolving into an online a space for teachers to share and reflect on practices--and share resources. As an example of how writing teachers can collaborate on blog topics, see Writing Topics.

At Community Forum we are working with blogs and discussion forums. In an earlier iteration of WritingBlog we had over 3000 students writing, most of whom were students in our writing programs or students in other writing programs around the country. What made this site valuable, perhaps, was that it was being used by students across sections in our large writing program and in other writing courses at universities elsewhere. In the future, on our new server and using Community Forum software, we hope to develop a spirited writing space for undergraduate student writers.

At public writing forums such as at Wikipedia, we are experimenting with assignments that challenge students to contribute to public writing sites. For example, students enrolled in a freshman writing course collaborated to create an encyclopedic entry for on a major museum.

At Newsvine.com, we are teaching four sections of ENC 1102. There, students post research plans, submit and peer review project drafts, and respond to informal writing prompts. Additionally, all students are required to create arguments and post them to the public side of Newsvine three times per semester, where they can be read and responded to by a community of thousands of users from all across the world.

While our efforts are largely exploratory, still too new to really judge their efficacy, we do know that what we have been doing has heretofore been impossible. In the past, teachers may have shared "teacher lore" in the hallways but thanks to today's social networking tools we are able to focus teachers' and students' innovative ideas. And we are clearly limited by our own literacy skills, lacking the technology authoring skills to redesign social software for our educational needs. In the future, we can anticipate a space where students vote on essays, bringing the best documents to the forefront.

Of course we have faced some resistance along the way--resistance related to the fact that our instructors (like the rest of our adjunct nation) are largely graduate students or adjuncts, as opposed to instructors or professors with benefits--and hence their attention might be focused on the courses they take as students or their understandable desire to find more secure long-term work. Yet as community develops around our efforts, as the technologies become transparent, allowing for a vital focus on community, resistance becomes thoughtful reflection on what we need to do next as well as a thoughtful space for exploring future literacy evolutions.

Happily, we have had unprecedented success with getting our faculty to use technology tools to collaborate. From our online surveys and student feedback, we know our students appreciate our efforts to integrate online readings and online writing spaces, seeing this move as relevant and more interesting than traditional textbooks. Perhaps the best way to characterize our efforts thus far is to say that we have had a good opportunity to collaborate about what matters to us and that we are curious to see how these projects will evolve over time.

We have found that

These tools can be used by teachers and writing program administrators to create ongoing conversations among teachers about pedagogical practices and program policies.
These tools have enabled teachers to collaborate on lessons plans (ENC 1101 , ENC 1102 ), the Program Philosophy detailed lesson plans and blog topics
The tools provide agency for those teachers who have taken the time to learn how to use them.
These tools have changed classrooms for students as well as teachers. When permitted by their instructors, students can collaborate on the course syllabus, writing assignments, and on one another's documents. Publishing writing online changes the dynamics of composing. For an example of a classroom wide collaborative project, see PublicWritingOnline.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Before concluding, lest we appear to be zealots, overeager drinkers of the newest technological Kool-Aid, we do understand that solitary writing matters. We acknowledge that in our classrooms we also privilege individual accomplishments, solitary writing, and individual agency. We value the power of the individual to create fundamental change. At times, an individual can be profoundly creative. Although it may be increasingly more difficult to be disconnected from the Internet, surely there are some writers out there now, working in isolation, toiling away in garrets.

We also acknowledge that collaborative writing can be more difficult than solitary writing. From stock market bubbles to real estate bubbles, from riots to the impassioned pleas of bystanders for suicide jumpers to take the leap, from needlessly off topic, mean reviews of texts submitted for publication to dysfunctional peer groups in writing classrooms, we all know groups of people can act illogically, capriciously, and in some instances viciously. On a personal level, we probably have all had poor experiences working in groups or committees. Collaborative writing can be fraught with difficulties – interpersonal problems, differences in opinion regarding roles and responsibilities, and even confusion regarding how to use specific tools. From James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds , we know that group think can happen when groups prohibit dissensus and that riots can happen when the group is composed of a disproportionate number of people who are predisposed to rioting.

Yet we have also learned that when dissensus is permitted groups of people can be wiser than individuals. Hence, while we acknowledge the difficulties invoked by collaborative work, we believe that today's new online social networking tools, including collaborative gaming environments, present a viable way to develop knowledge claims that may be wiser than the claims developed by individuals. In turn, we argue that social networking tools constitute a major new way to construct and disseminate knowledge.

We are living in a time of unparalleled literacy evolution. Instantaneous communication worldwide is changing creative and collaborative processes. What is now evolving is a whole new set of skills that are hard to compartmentalize -- the focus on being plugged into the network; the eternal now of the wiki space where writing is always subject to revision; the incessant exchanging and developing of information; the use of visuals and animation and streaming video to replace written texts; and the use of social networking sites to develop knowledge.

In sort, we want the emphasis on individual achievement to be balanced with an appreciation of and rewards for collaborative work. We want to balance the emphasis on winning and individual effort with an appreciation for the values of sharing knowledge and collaborating to develop knowledge. And, perhaps most importantly, we believe we need to revise our writing classrooms so students have access to the collaborative writing tools and practices that are required to be literate in the 21st Century. We want to acknowledge that the days of the solitary author in the garret have given away to the development of professional communities online where like-minded people intertwine their stories, developing a rhetoric, perhaps a rhetoric in response to the rhetorics of other professional communities.

In conclusion, if you disagree or agree with us, if you believe you can add to our analysis, we invite you to visit this essay on the Web at http://teachingwiki.org/default.aspx/TeachingWiki/CollaborationLiteracyAuthorship.html and rewrite it. Don't be shy. Go ahead and add yourself as a coauthor!

Works Cited

"Baseball." Wikipedia. 12 February 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball 5/1/06

Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" College English 46:7 (November 1984). 635-652.

"Digg: Traffic Ratings." Alexa.com. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.digg.com 5/1/06

Giles, Jim. "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head." news@nature.com 28 March 2006. http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html 5/1/06

Heller, Rafael. "Questionable Categories and the Case for Collaborative Writing." Rhetoric Review 22.3 (2003): 300-17.

Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. "Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. 417-438.

"Museum of Science and Industry (Tampa, FL)." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSI 5/1/06

Praetor605. "The Evidence of Evolution." Newsvine.com. 15 March 2006 http://praetor605.newsvine.com/_news/2006/03/15/128225-the-evidence-of-evolution 5/1/06

Smit, David. "Some Difficulties with Collaborative Learning." Journal of Advanced Composition 9 (1989): 45-58.

Spinuzzi, Clay, Jennifer Bowie, Ida Rodgers, Xiangyi Li. "Open Systems and Citizenship: Designing a Departmental Web Site as an Open System." Computers and Composition 20 (2003): 168-93.

Surowieck, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.

U.S. Department of Education Commission on the Future of Higher Education. http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html 5/1/06