Collaborative Writing

The essay that we worked on in class on Tuesday was the first experience I have had with collaborative writing. When we were first told to simply “go”, the class seemed to go into a bit of disarray. The googledoc had 20-something mice going in all different directions, there were different questions being answered in different parts of the document, and the situation seemed overall chaotic. In the beginning, it seemed as if each person essentially found a spot on the document and just went to work on some idea or question. This made it impossible for our essay to have any sense of cohesiveness. After the first 10 minutes of utter confusion, we began to discuss with one another what strategies would help make this seemingly impossible task possible. Professor Morgen had posed 4 or 5 separate questions so we began to delegate which people would or wanted to answer each individual question. Then, each person essentially found a secure spot on the document where they could write freely without interruption of one of the other mice. After about 20 minutes, we had about 5 pages of solid, concrete, valid responses to the questions Professor Morgen had posed. I believe our next step if we had more time would be to collectively organize our document into a somewhat cohesive answer to the questions asked. Overall, I thought the collaborative writing assignment was interesting and that with more practice we could actually create something of value.