Head to Head

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The wiki as a venue for collaborative writing projects may suffer from the fact that text only or text primary documents still tend to be single authored projects especially when compared to movies and videos which are almost by necessity group projects. Therefore it almost seems natural that text documents are most commonly understood to be the work of individuals, partly because larger more multimodal documents can not be so.

So, compelling students to write multi-authored documents might beg the question: Why bother? If you want to create multi-authored documents, why not make something more naturally multi-authored like a video or film narrative?

Current institutional technological limitations might be one – not so very good – answer to this question.

Another answer might be that our tendency to shift towards the single authored voice in text primary documents might point towards that medium as an important site to scrutinize with these sorts of collaborative assignments. This might fit into a critical pedagogical stance that seeks out structures we take for granted in our society that seem innocuous but might be dismantled in order to see what we can learn from the exercise. Such a stance could make use of Henry Giroux's border theory which he describes as "intent on challenging existing boundaries of knowledge and creating new ones [via student engagement in] the multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences and languages" (120). In this case, that entails seeking out the gray area between the single-authored voice and collaborative space of the wiki and exploring how those conflicting positions might inform each other when students move back to either side of the spectrum of writing.