It's that time again. Classes start on Tues, so what better time than now to try to reshape a syllabus? My experiment having students contribute to and actually write individual Wikipedia entries last semester rasied a lot of interesting issues for me and them. As an instructor, I became very interested in the issues surrounding intellectual property, intellectual collaboration, and how the former informs the latter, especially as students think about their work. A few of them were frustrated by the fact that publishing their work to Wikipedia meant that to a certain extent they were no longer the "author" in the way they conceived of it, and also many of them had their work taken down or worse yet not published to begin with, for a variety of reasons. I'm not repeating the assignment (though it was by far the most popular) for these and other reasons, but it get me thinking seriously about intellectual property issues.

So, like many of your teaching 306 this year (or the students taking it), I found myself reading Lessig's Free Culture and trying to think about how to use it, or parts of it, to teach my students how to do academic research and have them generate a collaborative work that is not one more paper with a first and second submission that I have to mark. Call me crazy, but I've got 50 students this semester, and I want to continue to teach the content while reducing some of the marking work.

I've been thinking about having them produce a few annotated bibliographies using delicious and our class wiki, but I haven't quite worked it out yet. I know I read on here somewhere that someone had their students write first submissions and then had their peer reviewers finish and turn in the essays. I'm wondering what other kind of experimentation has been going on with collaborative writing. I'm trying to drum up a way to teach research and have students practice paraphrasing and using outside sources, while contributing to a collective piece of writing on the web. I'd like them to create an assignment that helps them learn more about the issues of web publication or the different kinds of "rights" involved with intellectual property, GNU, Copy Left, Creative Commons, etc.

Has anyone done anything that involves the whole class generating one collective piece of writing, and if so, how did you frame/evaluate it?

Anyone interested in doing this kind of assignment for 306, we could collaborate...