Collaborative Scribing Redux

For the second part of this class we would like to experiment with weekly  collaborative writing assignments.  This will entail each group or cluster of writers to explore themes or questions encountered over the week’s worth of reading.  As a demonstration, this post will be a collaborative post: I’m starting it, and then my colleagues will comment on it & revise it as they see fit, as we fine-tune our vision for this part of the course.

The goal, in part, is to perform some of the ‘posthuman’ implications we have been discussing in the class.  Collaborative writing is an importantly difficult task to take on as humanists.  We don’t do nearly enough of it; we often don’t know how to do it.  So this assignment (collaborative scribing) is intended to give you experience doing something that is hard and unpredictable—but that can also result in fascinating and productive breakthroughs.

Here’s how I’m envisioning it: each group will have the entire week to write one post, question it, rewrite it, flesh it out, comment on it, and respond to comments.  On each Sunday evening that week’s scribing will be complete (obviously it can still develop, but that’s when the post will be officially ‘graded’), and the next group will begin a new post on Monday.  (I’ve pushed the first scribe assignment to week 4, so that we have time to orient ourselves as to how WordPress works.)

The scribe groups and dates are as follows:

Chris, Elle, Rolando: week 4 (Feb 1 & 3), week 10 (Mar 15 & 17)

Jonas, Andrew, Terra: week 5 (Feb  8 & 10), week 11 (Mar 22 & 24)

Joshua, Kalee, Cait: week 6 (Feb 15 & 17), week 12 (Mar 29 & 31)

Holly, Amalie, Jeffrey, Maria:  week 8 (Mar 1 & 3) , week 13 (Apr 5 & 7)

*Weeks 7 and 14 will be collaboratively written by Bell, Schaberg, & Schwartz