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November 01, 2005
collaboration is creepy? (collaborative writing 14.2/30)
Shilb, John. "The Sociological Imagination and the Ethics of Collaboration." In New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Ed. Janis Forman. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1992.
1 sentence summary: collaboration isn't an uncomplicated sharing activity, but has ethical complications and consequences that students should be taught to wrestle with and consider with real-world situations--and "struggles for freedom"--in mind.
passages:
107. argues "for a sociological approach to collaboration"--one in which students aren't just inducted into discourse communities but view their induction with critical skepticism
108. talking like LeFevre does, & like Reither & Vipond, about "the social" as if it's a safe construct allows it the potential to take over--which social do we mean, who chooses it, who controls it, who changes it?
109. assumption that academics have a "legitimate business" & that their writing serves it without interrogating that business is also suspect
110- suggests Mills' The Sociological Imagination as a lens through which to critically read LeFevre & others.
116. critiques the book's editorial set-up: to avoid making the impression of enforcing this sort of groupthink-collaboration, the editors stayed out of members' contributions, but they also didn't demand contributors collaborate, so the final book reads more as a series of individual contributions speaking in turn than a collaborative project--for good OR ill.
top 5: Bizzell (intro to disc. comm), Harris (CCC 40 (1989)11-22), LeFevre, Mills, Ohmann (grad students, professionals, intellectuals--in CE 52 (1990) 247-57)
Posted by ttobryan at November 1, 2005 07:06 PM