Students in a senior English class examined the question of whether the "wisdom of experts" or "the wisdom of crowds" is more reliable and useful in a writing course by engaging in a parallel Wikipedia project. Each student either created a new entry or made significant changes to an existing Wikipedia entry, tracked changes to…

Online collaborative writing tasks are frequently undertaken in forums and wikis. Variation between these two communication modes has yet to be examined, particularly type of feedback and its effects. We investigated the type of feedback and the impact of English native-speakers' feedback on Spanish peers' discourse restructuring in the context of…

Much of the work in academic writing has focused on the cognitive rather than the affective and social aspects involved in project-based writing. Emphasis in past research has been on skills and processes of writing rather than on affective factors such as motivation, attitudes, feelings or social factors involving intrapersonal and interpersonal…

Proposes a four-phase plan for a team formal report project in the business and technical writing course. Finds positive attitudes toward both the formal report and collaborative writing among students in 29 formal report groups. (SR)

Presents a rationale and method for introducing a hypertext authoring assignment in a professional writing course in computer-aided publishing. Describes a rhetorically centered pedagogy that incorporates portfolio assessment, collaborative authoring, and real world projects for teaching hypertext within the context of situated problem-solving…

This article describes a task-based writing project. High-school students in Zambia wrote a proposal to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in their community. By writing on a topic related to their lives, students were motivated and empowered to use their English skills for positive change. The project was an interactive workshop that invited a community…

Describes having students write an organizational analysis paper as part of a collaborative writing project in a human relations course. Discusses initial group formation and outlines the project. (SR)

For one educator, "Parents as Writing Partners" has been one of the most rewarding experiences of her teaching career. Her seventh-grade students got closer to their parents' thoughts and feelings through encouragement to reinforce their writing, conferring, and editing skills. When parents are asked to share in an assignment, they get closer to…

A practicum project was developed and implemented to teach information retrieval literacy skills to Grade 12 regular English students in a public high school. The research skills that the students were learning by mastering the electronic information systems in the school media center were used to research a "real world" problem to be…