Devising Collective Knowledges for the Technical Writing Classroom: A Course-Based Approach to Using Web 2.0 Writing Technologies in Collaborative Work

Technical and professional writing pedagogies have traditionally understood collaborative writing as an aggregate, cooperative venture between writers and subject matter experts. In contrast, this tutorial argues that Web 2.0 technologies offer technical and professional communication pedagogies more advantageous conceptions and practices of collaborative writing. The tutorial analyzes how new media technologies create a different collaborative writing environment and then discusses how these environments help collaborative writing methods create an alternative writing situation. The study concludes by examining the outcomes of student Web 2.0 research projects and by offering technical and professional writing instructors new pedagogical strategies for teaching collaborative writing.

With the onset of the information economy, one of the more fundamental challenges technical and professional writing instructors face is the conceptual and practical relationship among technology, knowledge, and pedagogical application. As Spinuzzi claims, the primary difficulty the information-economy context presents is how instructors will devise new teaching strategies that address the “coordinative, polycontextual, crossdisciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives) and that enables the transformations of information and texts that characterize work” [1, p. 266]. Indicative of this challenge is the role collaborative writing plays in both the classroom and general academic practice. Though many instructors emphasize collaborative writing as a cornerstone of their classroom pedagogy, they often overlook the rhetorical and dynamic opportunities Web 2.0 technologies offer students' technical writing practices.