If you’re a currently a member of a college faculty, it’s very likely that you came into the profession, or adjusted more than a decade ago, to using conventional word processing tools. Today, on many campuses, the most common writing implement is Microsoft Word, which prevailed over competitors such as WordStar, WordPerfect, and MacWrite during the 1980s and 1990s. Word can be a wonderful tool, which I still rely upon when drafting much of my single-author scholarship. But around 2010 I began to realize how most of my writing assignments were framed by what Word could do, and therefore limited by its constraints. Asking students to collaboratively author an essay, or simultaneously peer review each others’ work, or publish directly to the web raised many challenges because our primary word processing tool was not designed to teach this way.
But the recent wave of networked writing tools — such as wikis, Google Docs, and web publishing platforms — have nudged more of us to rethink not only what is possible, but to reconsider the most preferable ways of integrating meaningful writing into a liberal arts education. For years we’ve told ourselves that it’s the writing that matters, not the technology, which was a comfortable stance. But what’s changed is that newer web technologies challenge our traditional norms of what types of writing matter. Think about the philosophical puzzle about the sound in the forest, and ask yourself: If a student writes a paper, and the professor was the only person who read it, was it real writing? Stated another way, if the deeper purpose of expository writing is to exchange ideas and convince readers to consider alternate points of view, then shouldn’t liberal arts faculty strive to create more authentically communicative writing assignments that engage authors and audiences, beyond the eyes of the individual professor?
If that mission sounds overwhelming, you’re not alone. Many faculty consider ourselves unofficial teachers of writing, as we embrace its importance in our pedagogy, but never had specialized training in helping students to enhance their prose. We believe that we know good student writing when we see it, but have no formal background in the fields of rhetoric and composition. Moreover, it’s extremely difficult to keep pace with the dizzying array of newer digital tools — and the need to sort out which ones help or hinder our teaching — without feeling a bit older and more obsolete every day (while falling further behind on our grading). Therefore, it’s no surprise that many faculty simply rely upon the traditional word processors we’ve used for decades. In light of these real-world constraints, this essay offers some simple strategies and illustrations for integrating web-based writing, and argues that harnessing the inherent power of communities — both inside and outside of our classrooms — can make the writing process more authentic and meaningful for liberal arts education.
Long before the web, innovative faculty began teaching collaborative writing techniques as a challenge to the tradition of solitary authoring.[1] The transition from typewriters to word processors made this technique easier to teach, as students could independently author text and assign one team member to merge it into one document, or collaborate on writing one document by passing it back and forth. Several faculty took co-authoring one step further with wiki tools, which allow multiple users to edit the same web-based document (as Mike O’Donnell and others have shown in this volume).
But the writing tool that dropped my jaw — and reawakened the pedagogical side of my brain — was Google Documents, which enabled multiple users to edit the same web document and view collaborators as they typed changes in real time, in contrast to the delayed view of editing in wikis. Looking back, I originally understood that users could upload and share files on Google Docs in May 2009, but didn’t fully grasp its multi-authoring features until 2010 at my first THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp), where session organizers shared links to Google Documents for multiple participants to simultaneously share notes. If you’ve never seen collaborative writing in action, here’s a brief screencast of my students typing notes on the same Google Doc.
[1] Donald C Stewart, “Collaborative Learning and Composition: Boon or Bane?,” Rhetoric Review 7, no. 1 (1988): 58–83; Rebecca Moore Howard, “Collaborative Pedagogy,” in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, ed. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), cited in Emily Viggiano, “Teaching Tip Sheet: Collaborative Writing” (Writing Across the Curriculum, George Mason University, circa 2004), http://wac.gmu.edu/supporting/tip_sheet_collaboration.pdf.