remix

Collaborative Writing

December 5th, 2009  •  Posted by English 579: Computers & Writing  • 

What is collaboration in the classroom? At its most basic level, collaboration is students working together to complete an assignment. Such a project could be using all manner of media - audio, video, images, - to create a multimodal essay such as this one where students were told to "Describe your neighborhood" or creating a wiki (a web site that allows users to add and update content on the site using their own web browser made possible by wiki software that runs on the web browser) to create content for, say, a local restaurant or other favorite student hangout. Regardless of what means the students use to reach whatever means as outlined in the assignment, collaboration is key.

According to Miller and Brunk-Chavez, collaborative learning empowers students; once the assignment is given all authority over the process and the end product is transferred to the groups. Students working collaboratively will often arrive at unexpected, unforeseen, or even conflicting solutions or answers which yield exploratory talk - statements and suggestions offered for joint consideration. These are then challenged and counter-challenged with justifications and alternative hypotheses. This process fosters socially constructed knowledge through meaningful conversations between students.

While scholars offer a further multitude of reasons for using collaboration in writing classrooms, for our purposes as General Education Writing Instructors at NMSU, collaboration meets and often exceeds the Common Core Competencies legislated by the Higher Education Department of the State of New Mexico (which directly inform the English 111 objectives, but should be applied to 200-level courses as well).

For a further understanding of how collaboration meets specific core standards, please feel free to explore the following links:

Basic Guidelines

Core Standards