Response to "Fostering Collaborative Digital Writing"

My experience with wikipedia and my lack of any experience with wikis made me prejudiced against them. I misunderstood what wikis were. I thought they were a single site where anybody could enter and change the information. While that certainly can be true, this chapter helped me understand that wikis could be controlled by a single administrator and enable a class to create a single document collaboratively. I especially appreciated the ideas for using wikis presented in this chapter such as the college poetry instructor who employed wikis to have students link words or lines in a poem to commentaries and other sites, the choose your won adventure type story, creating a book review, or creating a study guide.

I also liked the idea of using Googledocs to help students revise their work. I use a somewhat similar process for my newspaper class, in which my journalists save their writing in a word doc to a server, then I and my editors open the doc making comments and suggesting revisions. The reporters then open the document back up, read the comments, and submit a final draft on the server that the layout editors pull to place on the page. This is the process I used when working at an actual newspaper, and it works well.

Some important things to remember are the FERPA caution provided at the end of the chapter--kids still have a right to privacy when it comes to their grades. Also, it's important to remember that when making comments, etc., it is still just as important (in my opinion even more important) to focus on the positives as it is on what can be improved. I find that commenting on the word document enables me to write more as I can type faster than I can hand write. I have to be careful not to over comment or overwhelm my students with feedback. There is, I think, a saturation point, and it needs to be their writing. We still have to instruct students about how to provide and interpret peer and instructor feedback. That said, I think this technology is providing us with a POWERFUL tool to engage students in meaningful writing opportunities that take advantage of a constructivist approach to learning.