Collaborative Blogging about College Movies

Collaborative writing has become much more productive with the development of software that can support multiple, and even simultaneous, editors. Previously, "group" projects have been troubled by logistical challenges, unclear expectations concerning the division of labor, and difficulty producing a physical collaborative text. Now, students can write and design together in class, from a distance, and in asynchronous process.

One concern that emerges when assigning collaborative compositions is that individual students do not receive enough support for their writing. Collaboration succeeds in major learning outcomes such as rhetorical awareness and the development of a process because teams work towards these together. Bt what about the individual students ability to transfer these strategies and awareness to future writing situations? Don't students need feedback about their individual efforts in invention, organization, and sentence writing?

Formatting problems occurred when multiple students pasted into the blog post from various writing platforms (word processors, forum posts, online documents).

Sometimes students wrote "place holder notes" to their team members, forgetting to delete them in the final text.

The first person voice was sometimes used in individual contributions to team-authored texts. We discussed the strategies for unifying the voice of a collaborative text, including using a collective "we" or writing entirely from third person perspective. 

Building in individual contributions and accountability.

Analysis of movie choices.

Project Forums

Team processes. Midterm portfolio includes important student descriptions.

My responding. Feelings about outcome.