Week Four: Collaboration

A Peek at the Week

This week, we were tasked with reading the following literature: chapter four of Net Smart by Rheingold, chapter eleven of Writing Spaces by Cassie Hemstrom and Kathy Anders, "Reading, writing and co-authorship in blogs" by Adlington and Feez, "The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing" by Kristen Purchell, et. al, and the "Web Rhetoric, Authorship, and Digital Writing" lecture Power Point. Each of these writings are summarized below:

•  In this chapter of Net Smart, we learn about the different types of collective intelligence. To begin, the author summarizes the Web and how it started as well as how it evolved. Then, the four skills needed to make the Web possible are described: attention, tools, institutions, and cooperation. In the text, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration are defined and discussed to set a clear basis for the rest of the texts. In the middle of this chapter, five forms of mass collaboration are brought up to be talked about: collective intelligence, virtual communities, social production, crowdsourcing, and wiki collaboration. The author then goes into a deep dive for each of these collaboration techniques for the remainder of the chapter. 

• In the text Writing Spaces, we were tasked with reading "Creating, Using and Sharing Information in Research Communities". This particular chapter discusses research communities in length. To begin, the author defines discourse communities and information literacy as research communities are a combination of both those foundations. After this, the authors define the features of research communities: share information in specific places, in a controversial manner, in a genre, in a format, in a media, in certain terms, in levels of expertise, and in ethical ways. Each of these features are then defined and elaborated on to provide readers with a clearer understanding. Then, an example using one of the author's experiences is used to connect each of these features. With that said, it is clear from the article that research communities are active and dynamic in a way that requires participation from a variety of individuals or groups. 

• In the article "Reading, writing and co-authorship in blogs", the topic of blogs is discussed through a study. In the text, a blog is defined as "...an online text comprising two or more posts by the log author presented in reverse chronological order" (Adlington and Feez, p.5). The data for this study was forty-eight blogs written by children from ages five to eight. These blogs were then analyzed using various methods to come to the results of co-authorship in blogs. Co-authorship is found through tags and comments. 

• In "The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing", the topic of digital literacies and writing in the classrooms is studied and assessed. This group of scholars took data from AP and NWP teachers to look at the different opinions when it comes to digital tools in class. As digital tools help students collaborate and communicate, they also pose problems for teachers including informality in writing and plagiarism. This digital realm is essential for life now, but teachers still want students to understand how to write and think for themselves traditionally. The ending of the article discusses the methods for the study and information about the project. 

• The Power Point reviewed this week discusses digital writing as it cites many different digital writing platforms. Along with digital writing comes the visual aspects including fonts, format, images, and links. With that said, hypertext and hypermedia are defined in the presentation in depth. Later in the presentation, rhetoric is discussed by elaborating on ethos, pathos, and logos in design and content.
  

Connections

These texts connect with what we have read in class before because they involve participation which is discussed in all of week three's literature. In addition, each of these texts build off of the attention and credibility foundation set in the previous chapters because each of these ideas are necessary to understand in order to be able to collaborate properly online. Is your foundation built?

Visual of the Week

The image below represents the topics of the week because it shows how two individuals online are collaborating to build something. Since we learned about collaboration this week, it is important to visualize how we can come together.

Alt Text of Image Description: The image features two phones with two people coming out of them. These people are holding puzzle pieces that connect. The image symbolizes connecting online through collaboration.

Contributions to Learning

This week's readings have contributed to my learning of digital writing because it gave me the understanding of how I should be collaborating. Specifically, most of these readings brought up blogs which relate to class as we have to create our own blog. These readings have helped me grasp an understanding about blogs and all social platforms. 

Ponder This

How do you collaborate online?

Sources

Rachael Adlington & Susan Feez (2019). Reading, writing and co-authorship in

blogs. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 42, No. 1. 

Stock vector images, graphics and royalty-free vectors. Adobe Stock. (n.d.).

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