Recognizing the Richness of Digital Collaboration
Launched in July 2007, a wiki-based project has attempted to translate the entire bible into lolcat, or “kitty pidgin English.” Accessed more than 2.5 million times, thousands of people–across time, space, culture, and country–have contributed bits and books. This is a silly example, but a powerful one in terms of digital collaboration: http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
Joe Bellino, a teacher-consultant with the Maryland Writing Project, who teaches English language learners has written and talked about the affordances of Google docs as a collaborative writing space. You can download a technology “recipes” booklet for English Language Learners, originally part of a TESOL institute held in New York City in 2008, from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/10969/ELL_Tech_Recipe.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d.
Bellino co-authored the booklet with Robert Rivera-Amezola, C. Lynn Jacobs, and Judy Rance-Roney. Each recipe includes an overview, instructions, and discussion. Along with recipes for creating blogs, crafting digital stories, recording podcasts, and creating wikispaces, Bellino’s Google Docs recipe provides specifics on setting up a doc, inviting students as collaborators, and managing many students and/or multiple classes.
