Ripping Yarns

The second half of the collaboarative effort by Lansford and Ede gives an overview of the concept of authorship.

To briefly recap our heroines' strange adventures ................when he had last left Lansford and Ede-they were presenting their survey research (!?) on the world of everyday writing in which collaborative authorship is the norm.

Our tale now picks up with our intrepid adventuress' reacpping the history of authorship.

Much of this is material our class (Gosh we're smart!!) has already gone over, in which we have learned that single authorship is a relaqtively new concept..medieval and even renaissance authors did not consider themselves tortured geniuses living alone in a garret.

I would really like to focus on one of the more interesting chapters, to me, in these authors' writing on authorship-This is Carpenter's taxnomy of writing (93-95). Carpenter deconstructs (must be one of those darn post-modernists) writing into five essential categories: writing up, down, in, out and over. Writing down is essentially transcription-writing up-is the creation of new semantic material--Writing out is filling out a skeletal report, such as when notes from a meeting are "filled out." Writing in, is supplying missing data from something already written "down"-writing over is the act of compiling, revising, or abridging.

Here's why I find this so fascinating-we have whole bodies of knowledge that fall into one of these other categories and yet they are ascribed to being writing up, as if to privelige them. Let me illustrate with a point if I might. Hegel did not publish his "own" philosophical works. In fact, one of the reasons why Hegel may be such a tough row to hoe is because his students compiled "his" works from their notes. In other words, what we have is not what Hegel wrote up-but what his students wroted down, in out and over. Yet, the work is ascribed to being an act of writing up-is this done by devoted acolytes in service of theirm aster. If so, might we not have material ascribed to Hegel that is actually written up-by a group of his students?

I also liked the section in the last chapter on the differences between cooperative and collaboarative learning. Coooperative learning in cooperative learning (p. 117). Individuals become experts and then lead in some aspects of the cooperative enterprise, which is then largely pursued individualistically. It is mostly positivistic. Collaborative learning as I understand it, carries the collectivist aspect through to the end-did I totally miss the boat on this-or is this what it actually is? Cooperative learning, it would appear still priveliges the concept of single authorship.

My question in this is, given that grading is still considered an individual achievement-how do we foster collaborative learning-the system would still seem to be rigged towards individual authorship.