Transforming the Group Paper with Collaborative Online Writing

Peter Kittle and Troy Hicks

Kittle and Hicks take a high-brow look at how collaborative online writing can bring new dimensions to group writing.  They raise questions about roles and authorship in collaboration which have sent me scurrying to my own group’s wiki, and has me reappraising some of the group work we have done in class.

We recently had to discourse upon a photograph and present our “findings” on a Google Doc: I recall that in class, the practicality and immediacy of collaboration resulted in one person typing and their partner “assisting” by suggesting further lines or ideas. The result, I recall well, was a text that strongly characterized the voice of only one individual. Thus David  and I produced a text that a familiar reader would have described as “my writing” not David’s, and the partnership next to us produced a text that had Harry written all over it. Obviously, working with a partner beside you is not true online collaboration. Different texts with different voices might be more likely to be produced when partners are working independently on the same text, in which the text itself becomes the voice of collaboration.

This, indeed, was the case with our wiki collaborative projects, first the video lesson and now, most recently, with our ongoing third assignment in which we are analyzing, describing and presenting findings related to a building on campus. As each of us revisits the pages to see how the assignment is progressing, we each edit or revise the extant text and comment and question using the discussion board. The report steadily grows and becomes a blend of the voices of the three collaborators. But there is a problem with this for an instructor.

When it becomes time to review the collective work, say on a wiki, it is not readily apparent that all participants created the work equally. It is easy for one member of the group to ride on the coattails of the other contributors and receive equal credit where credit is not due. The only way to assess the individual contributions is to view the history page, itself a challenging task. If a text has undergone a great deal of editing, the question that presents itself is how to place value on individual contributions. Do we tally the number of edits per individual? Do we assess the kind of contribution made in a particular edit in relation to other kinds of edits made by others? Or other kinds of contributions altogether, such as research? Or do we assume total group responsibility and ignore the history altogether? Complaints of partners not pulling their own weight have long been a part of group projects.

It’s an interesting ethical question and one that is not easy to answer. To be fair to all group participants requires the instructor to become far more involved in the process of text creation than is often feasible, but to focus purely on product can introduce inequities that might build resentments. Authorship indeed becomes a difficult question to posit.  It is a question that I will continue to consider as we move forward with our own group project.