Many thoughts have been gathering in my mind lately - nostalgia for the end of summer, preparing for classes, etc. - but they haven't managed to crowd out some recent thinking about the value of online collaboration. To spur a discussion on this topic in my "Teaching English with Technology" course last night, I asked my students whether they disagreed with the following statement by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." Even though this was taken out of context, I must admit that I was shocked that the majority of them agreed with the wily German classicist (I do too, much of the time, but not on this point). And even for those that disagreed, they only resisted what they thought was the philosophical problem of Nietzsche's apparent imprecision about where madness could be located - that is, if madness could be realized in groups, wouldn't it then exist as a potentiality in the individuals that make up the group? Only one student suggested that this statement appeared to be unnecessarily pessimistic about the intelligence or sanity of groups. Given the recent emphasis on collaboration in education, I wonder if this skepticism about the value of group work is even more widespread than I suspected.
I've been thinking quite a bit about this question, particularly how a "crowd" might be harnessed within pedagogical settings, specifically in the service of response to student writing. For most of us who teach English classes, our intellectual mobs are thankfully fairly small, but I've become increasingly convinced that even groups as small as 15 can offer each other a volume of feedback, unmatched by most writing teachers or peer revision groups, that can be facilitated with little effort in blogs and wikis. I've experimented a bit with a "crowd review," or online student review of their peers' work, in both my undergraduate and graduate courses with some mild success that I'd like to share here. And as a matter of fact, I will be sharing these thoughts at an October 5th CIT/Edtech Faculty Forum, so I would greatly appreciate any crowd I can gather here to respond to the following piece.
