Digital Writing: The case of multiple authors...

Growing up, I hated, loathed, detested, and despised group work.  It was awful - the bane of my existence and the cause of many a sleepless night.  What you may not know about me is that I'm a very type-A extrinsically motivated person.  I can also be a little bit of a control freak.  What that meant, when it came to group work, was that I didn't trust anyone else enough to complete the project as well as I could and therefore guarantee me the A I so highly coveted.  Hence, I tended to do the group work all by myself, and for the most part, my group members let me.  Who were they to complain?

Fast forward into the 21st century.  Nowadays, group work can easily be accomplished via sites like Google and by means of wikis.  Not only group work, but group authorship.  More than one author can work on and edit a document for instant publication on the Internet.  For me, this is a little bit frightening.

The English teacher in me asks questions about authorial intent and voice.  How can one piece have a consistent voice when multiple authors are at work on it?  How can you be sure, when there are multiple authors, that there is a shared sense of purpose - are they all writing for the same reason, with the same aim and audience in mind? 

It's hard enough to teach students to write as individuals, but to teach them to write collaboratively?  Wow.  I mean, I ask students to peer edit each others' work, they share response journals and respond to each other, they even respond to each others' blog posts, but as a teacher, I've never really asked them to co-author a formal piece together.  Maybe that's because I'm still haunted by my own experiences with group work as a student, or maybe it's because I'm just not sure how to go about doing it.

I'm about to embark on a collaborative writing project myself.  It's not the first.  A fellow English teacher and I co-authored the final report the last time our school went through NEASC accreditation.  It was a huge report, but we were both professionals with a clear sense of purpose and audience, so it was easy for us to work together and create a unified piece.  The whole idea seems like a much bigger challenge when dealing with students.  Maybe this new collaborative writing experience I'm about to begin will help me figure out how to meet and get my students to rise to that challenge.  I'll have to keep you posted!