Response to “Transforming the Group Paper with Collaborative Online Writing”

I was hoping “Transforming the Group Paper with Collaborative Online Writing” by Peter Kittle and Troy Hicks would convince me that collaborative writing is a useful tool. I remain unconvinced, as they mainly explained how to teach it in the classroom. I’m not sure I will do this. I, personally, hate group work, and I think most people agree with me, even extroverts. No one likes relying on other people for their grade, unless you’re lazy. Group work should be collaborative, but it usually does not turn out that way.

Disclaimer: This is not to say I don’t enjoy working with Kacee and Abby. I do! They’re great group members!

However, I think back to the first time I had to write a collaborative paper. It was my freshman year of college in a terrible ethics class I had to take. We had to find an ethical situation in a TV show or movie, and work with three other people to write a paper about it, which we then had to present. The paper had to be ten pages, so I delegated two pages to everyone else and took four for myself (for the team.) I also edited everyone else’s parts (which I would have done anyway, because I’m Hannah) and made sure it flowed (and trust me, after tons of edits, that thing FLOWED.)

The problem? The way the grading was assigned was by peer evaluations. You could only assign one A, one B, one C, and one D. Nothing more, nothing less. The “leader” of our group decided she would spend hours in the video lab copying the portions of the TV show we were using (The OC, which she also chose) so they could be shown directly without skipping or rewinding…Even though that was not required! So she spent more time on it than I did, but I had other things to do! So even with all the work I put in, I still got a B.

Now I know this issue has more to do with group work than collaborative writing, but I feel like it just serves no purpose. I can understand having groups work collaboratively on Wikis, like we’ve been doing in class–But that is far different than writing a paper together.

One example I think of is a book I read last semester for Dr. Rish’s class called Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom: Being the Book and Being the Change by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Bruce Novak. Aside from the fact that it was terribly boring, it was awkward to read because Wilhelm and Novak had trouble with the collaborating part and instead referred to themselves in third person so it was clear who was writing what. For example, in paragraph one: Bruce feels like blah blah blah. Paragraph two: Jeff thinks blah blah blah. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose??

I will say one thing though, in the opposite order of what Kacee calls the “Pet pet slap theory.” I could hardly tell this article was written by two people! Kittle and Hicks were successful in writing collaboratively.