Collaborative sounds like an easy task, until you actually
have to do it. You don’t realize that you have to take into account other people’s
opinion, other’s motives for writing, and you have to account for everyone
schedule too. It’s hard. And my group dropped the ball this week. Between our
misunderstanding for the assignment and our hectic schedule our “collaboration”
was tougher than I think we anticipated.
We used Google Docs as our method of choice because it was
most familiar and easiest to use and we settled on telling a coming-of-age tale
because it was the first suggestion made and we all uploaded our stories individually.
Instead of having a collaboration with our similar stories intertwining with
one another we used each other’s stories and writing techniques to craft our
coming-of-age tales.
I, myself, did not a have a comprehensive knowledge of all
the tools the Google Docs had to offer, like being able to see all of the
revision history and different authors using different colors. After seeing
what other groups had done and how the used Google Docs and all of its advantages
I can see how collaborative writing can be a good thing and how it can help to
produce a good piece of work. I know that if I were to do this again, I would
understand the tools we have better and be able to use them to my advantage.
As I say in other groups there is a downside to collaboration
that my group did not face. It can lead to a decent amount of frustration too.
I know that one group shared their frustration when it came to editing their
essay and determining who had the final say in what was okay to include in the
final piece. “Any collaborative writing endeavor promises a representative
articulation, a compromise of voices and points of view: eventually.” (Editing
Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy, Explanation in Process).
This process reminded me a little of Hood’s Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing
Pedagogy. Even though this not Wikipedia, it is still a collaborative effort
to instill a certain knowledge to an audience. Similar to Wikipedia you have multiple authors
trying to get a certain point out and sometimes those thought processes do not
mesh and what one author finds important may not be important to another which
can lead to taking out phrases and sections which can lead to frustration
between authors or editors. This is the biggest con when it comes to collaborative
writing that I saw.
I think if we had understood our assignment better we would
have been able to sympathize with the struggles that other groups seemed to face.
I think that collaborative work would be a fun and useful tool for leisure, but
when it comes to an assignment it’s more of a hassle than anything, especial
when you drop the ball.
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