In addition to the collaboratively authored blog posts linked from this page, I also engaged in partner work for in-class activities, like this map on my homepage, a discussion that contributed to terms on this wordle, and one major project--a Wikipedia entry. Though the in-class work was assigned, my colleague, Joe Cirio, and I decided to work collaboratively on the Wikipedia entry because we both share in an interest in Writing Assessment, and we felt that at least two people needed to work together to create this page. Joe and I engaged in a multimodal composing and revising process, which I describe in this reflection.

 

What I appreciate most about my partner-work is the different approaches my partners and I took for each assignment. For instance, meeting to discuss our blog post or project was crucial for all three out-of-class activities, but only two of these meetings lasted over an hour or occurred on multiple occasions. Working collaboratively in a Google Doc was also important for each task because we could start a document with an outline during our meeting and continue to add our individual ideas later. The most varied portion of the composing process was revising: for one blog entry my partner and I used the chat function in Google Docs so that we could easily compare notes on the draft and revisions; for another blog entry my partner and I exchanged messages through Facebook, as that seemed to be his preference for communicating; for the Wikipedia project my partner and I made notes to each other in the document, sent each other multiple emails, and worked together in the Digital Studio to make revisions we could see on the Smartboard. Each of these approaches worked equally well for the particular task, and this experience has shown me that being more flexible with my work habits is crucial for collaborating with others and learning from the process.