The Burden of Togetherness

Working with a group is not something I do well. I understand it is an important life skill to learn, but I do not like when it is forced upon me. I work better alone, that way no one drags me down, and I do not drag anyone down. So, when faced with the assignment to work together on a multimidal composing platform, I cringed inside. This was not the time to force me to work with others. It was hitting the stride in the semester when teachers are gearing up for final projects and essays and smongst all that is hte usual course load, so having to shove group coordination in the middle is a nightmare. Add to that the Google Docs stubborn desire to not let me access the document and we have a recipe for destruction. I felt horrible that I could not contribute as much as soon or the way I wanted, because I am usually the person who has their stuff together in groups and I always loathed that member who could not get it together until the last minute, but there was too much life going on.

Collaborative composing is something that works best in a casual setting. I have done it with friends before and it was a good way to imrpove both of our writing, hoewever it is something should never be forced on a group, especially not when coupled with having to use a totally new form of composing. It is one thing if the group is too busy, or does not gel the right way to compose collaboratively, but add to that having to access a totally new form of composition and you have a toxic swill of potential unpreparedness. I think that collaborative composisng, as seen in the meta texting done in Yancey's keynote address "Made Not Only In Words," can work very well and even enhance a piece, but only if all participants have the room and the mindest to complete such a task.

The assignment to collaboratively compose multimodally certainly showed me the pros and cons of bringing multimodality into the classroom, but I think assignments like this are an important first step to fully incorporating multimodality.