Many compositionists recognize the importance of collaborative work and the social construction of knowledge. Bruffee’s 1984 articulation of the concept of collaboration (influenced by Rorty’s notion of normal discourse) provides an excellent model for the type of collaborative environment we hoped to foster in our online classes:

Our task must involve engaging students in conversation among themselves at as many points in both the writing and the reading process as possible, and we should contrive to ensure that students’ conversation about what they read and write is similar in as many ways as possible to the way we would like them to eventually read and write . . . to organize students for these purposes is to organize collaborative learning . . . Besides providing a particular kind of conversation (intellectually and substantively focused), collaborative learning also provides a particular kind of social context for conversation, a particular kind of community - a community of status equals: peers (400-401).