WordPress Work

Your blog post about your collaboration within a community is due today. I want you to start strong on your WordPress blogs because you will be composing there often. We’ll take a good part of this class period to ensure that everyone knows how to title their site and post blogs, looking at some of our peers’ work as models. I encourage you all to check out Fatima’s, Jaqy’s, Katherine’s, Mitchie’s, Peter’s, and Simran’s sites linked in the Blog Roll on the right. As we look at a few of our peers’ examples together, keep Bruffee’s article “Collaboration and the ‘Conversation of Mankind'” in mind. For Bruffee (1984), collaborative learning is at its best when “knowledge is maintained and established by communities of knowledgeable peers” (p.646). By inviting peers into the space of collaboration–by teaching people new to a group the language, ideas, behaviors of the group–authority changes in productive ways. How have your peers changed their own authority through the kinds of collaboration they write about in their most recent blog?

Take time to revise your recent post (and page layouts if necessary). I expect these revisions to be complete and posted to your WordPress sites by our next class 2/8. As a reminder, to get full credit for your blog post, write at least 300 words, include a citation (as I’ve done below…this time using APA citation method!) and engage the following questions: What was the goal that you worked towards collaboratively? What did you teach your peers? What did you learn from your peers? Describe your accomplishments.

Collaborative Intersections

Share your posts (even if you’re still drafting) with the other members in your group. Take note of patterns that you see. What commonalities exists between your kinds of collaboration? Did you work with people in similar ways? What important differences do you note? Do these differences teach you anything about collaboration?

Models of Collaboration

We’ll look together at McNamee & Miley’s “Writing Center as Homeplace” & Efthymiou & Zea’s “Doing More with Barely Enough” for how they model collaborative writing.

Work Cited

Bruffee, B. (1984) Collaboration and the “Conversation of Mankind.” College English, 46(7), 635-652.

HOMEWORK

Revise your WordPress sites by our next class 2/8. As a reminder, to get full credit for your recent blog post, write at least 300 words, include a citation (as I’ve done below…this time using APA citation method!) and engage the following questions: What was the goal that you worked towards collaboratively? What did you teach your peers? What did you learn from your peers? Describe your accomplishments.

Take a closer look at McNamee & Miley’s “Writing Center as Homeplace” & Efthymiou & Zea’s “Doing More with Barely Enough,” paying close attention to form. Each article represents voices from different positions within higher education. How do these different voices engage with each other? How does authority shift in these examples of collaborative writing? We’ll talk more about these examples next class when we assign the Collaborative History Project.