Collaborative College Composition: the Possibilities

1. Collaborative College Composition:the Possibilities Lynn A. Casmier-Paz Dept. of English

2. College Composition—The Standard Process • Students get paper assignments from the instructor; • Students research their papers in isolation (to prevent plagiarism?); • Students write rough drafts of their essays; • They share their essays in class: • Peer group reading and response • Group members are given their own hard copy of the essay draft; • Instructor-guided reading and analysis techniques • Peer groups give back the edited copy of the essay; • Student writer revises the essay, based upon peer group suggestions; • Instructor evaluates the essay.

3. My Ideas: Revised College Composition Process as Collaboration • Students research their papers collaboratively, in the classroom; • Students share ideas and help each other find information; • Students write essays (this will stay the same—they write at home); • Student writers bring essays on disks to Collaborative Classroom; • Peer groups: students who share a “module” with the writer will read the essay on the computer, and edit/make suggestions on the draft via Microsoft Word; • Student writer saves the peer group responses and suggestions as a separate file; • Student writer revises the essay, and saves as a separate “revised” essay—final draft • Instructor evaluates all phases of the writing process • Instructor also assigns a “peer group reader” grade for each student who shares a module; • Evaluation ideas? (can students then grade each other’s papers?)

4. Collaborative College Composition:Objectives • Students will learn how to do research in groups (possible plagiarism problems?); • Students will learn to do research on the Internet, and to determine appropriate and useful sites; • Students will write full-length draft essays for peer group responses and reading; • Peer groups will use word processing software to read and edit student essays; • Students will read peer group responses and revise draft essays to produce final drafts that show they have understood and responded to peer group suggestions.

5. Collaborative College Composition:Evaluation and Assessment • Students will be evaluated on every step of the writing process: Internet research; rough draft, revision, final draft; • Peer group readers will be evaluated on the substance, quality, and quantity of their suggestions for revision; • Student writers will be evaluated on the quality of their final drafts.

6. An Example of Collaborative Composition:From A Teacher’s Writing The writing seen in the following illustration is from an article that has been edited for publication by using Word editing capabilities.

7. Editing in MS Word • Shows readers’ comments • Deletions shown in margins; revisions shown in red

8. Letters can indicate footnote comments or suggestions at the bottom of the page • Writers can accept the changes, or reject them—one by one, or all at one time

9. Conclusions • Students will need time in the classroom to learn the editing features of Word and Internet research strategies • Word’s features, although useful are not ideal • The Ideal: GroupWare? • Continue to research and try different collaborative writing software/GroupWare: • Software: PROSE, INTERCHANGE, PREWRITE, R-WISE Writing Tutor, Pre-Editor, Comments-Notes • Read recent research in collaborative writing and software (see Bibliography)