Behind the Scenes        Head to Head        Postmodern Riffs         

Last winter quarter, John and I developed a group writing assignment based on students using a pbwiki (“Make a free, password-protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich”) as an environment for collaboration. We both taught junior level composition classes (Rhetoric and Writing II), based on technology, using Vitanaza’s abridged CyberReader. I taught my class in a computer classroom, John did not. The project was carefully designed in such a way that students would work on it for about an hour or two per week during the quarter. The final project would be turned in during exams week and count towards their grades. In addition to collaborating on various components of the writing project, which consisted of a critical introduction to a pop-culture phenomenon and a short annotated review of links related to that topic, students were also required to perform peer critiques in the wiki medium and on the MOO.