Week 8: Discuss an assignment that uses collaboration and technology

Until the last few semesters of my graduate studies, I had never been very interested in collaborative assignments. This semester, however, I've started to become very interested in collaborative writing. I'm not super familiar with designing collaborative assignments (good ones, anyway), so my description will be short and probably underdeveloped. Any feedback, references, or suggested readings would be much appreciated.

During my undergraduate creative writing workshops, we experimented with various community writing activities, such as the exquisite corpse game. Once, we even collaboratively developed character cards, where we would come up with a character name, then pass the cards to the next person, who would list a few defining physical characteristics, then the cards would get passed along again for the next set of details. By the end of it, we all twenty-something characters to write about, all of whom were characters that none of us could have created alone. We swapped cards a few more times to randomize who had which card, and our assignment was to write a flash fiction piece about the character who was on our card. Mine was a saucy, southern, bounty-hunter type, and when I looked at my card, I could see him there, sprawled out disrespectfully on a set of steps, smoking a cigar, and meeting my gaze with a steady look that made known his impatience to get the show on the road already.

My assignment draws from this experience, but instead of developing character cards, I would have students work in small groups to collaboratively write a short piece of flash fiction in groups. I would also ask them to illustrate their story using whatever method or technology they agreed upon (that would be reasonable for the scope of the assignment, of course). I would let students decide whether they wanted to each write sections of the story, or if they wanted to collaboratively agree upon a plot and have just one or two group members write the text version of the story. Likewise, they could all contribute to the illustration, or they could all discuss how they wanted certain characters or scenes to be portrayed and have one or two group members compose those illustrations. However, I would require all group members to make some kind of contribution to both the textual and the visual versions of the narrative, and I would give them plenty of class time to work in their groups, which would help me make sure that everyone is contributing ideas and no one gets left out.

My primary objectives with this assignment would be to encourage a post-process approach to both writing and technology and to engage students with the differences that medium can impose on the same narrative. I would also have students reflect on how their group's social interactions influenced and directed the narrative. My hope is that this would allow students to begin to see that all writing is situated in a social and cultural context.