20 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
20 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Collaboration
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date: '2008-07-31T00:13:12-04:00'
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permalink: /collaboration/
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tags:
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- 'planned obsolescence'
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- writing
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---
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Just before plunging back into my chapter this morning, I took my usual tour of the RSS feeds, and discovered DR’s post about [collaborative authorship](http://mariblog.typepad.com/writing_maternity/2008/07/oh-right-conversation.html) and its benefits. And just in the nick of time: the section of the chapter that I’m working on today is about the benefits of collaboration and other forms of socially-situated scholarly writing.
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Most of the time, when scholars (outside rhet-comp, at least) discuss the benefits of collaboration, the first claim that gets made for it is “increased productivity,” a phrase that cannot help but raise specters for me, on the one hand, of some old forgotten joke about the new tractor and the Soviet five-year plan, and on the other, of Bill Readings’s assessment of the Fordist enterprise that higher education has become: “Produce what knowledge you like, only produce more of it, so that the system can speculate on knowledge differentials, can profit from the accumulation of intellectual capital” (164).
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So I resist thinking about collaboration as a means of getting *more* work done. What I’m interested in is the ways that collaboration and other social modes of writing, and particularly those enabled by digital networks, might allow us to get *better* work done. (I say “other social modes of writing” because I want to include in the category that I’m thinking about not just literal co-authorship but also electronic extensions of phenomena like writing groups, in which the input of respondents can become as important to the process as the work one does in solitude.)
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I’d really like to hear about your experiences: if you’ve worked in such a collaborative environment, how did it improve your work, either on the level of process or of product? What were the benefits of working, as DR describes, in a conversational framework? What, if any, were the drawbacks?
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(And if there’s particular stuff in the literature about collaborative writing that you would feel a section of a chapter on digital authorship to be incomplete without referencing, I’d really love to hear about them…)
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