Gypsysavage’s Weblog

If we think of collaboration as an assembly-line or segmentation model of working together, as George P. Landow puts it, in which any number of people contribute to a piece of writing over a period of time, then authorship becomes an issue of acknowledgment. What else could it be? We live in a society where authorial credit for an endeavor is currency. Authorship, especially in the humanities, gives us a sense of meaning, as well as legal and professional benefits.

But with hypertext, it is common to think that collaborative writing takes the place of individual achievement, which can be translated in some circles as the death of the byline. Read the rest of this entry »

In Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice, the author very politely suggests a different approach to education. His intentions are made in a vague preamble; he is not trying to replace the fundamental assumptions of other theories of learning, but instead offers the reader a different perspective – education as a social phenomenon, a process within the context of our daily lives, i.e. work, school, hobbies, community groups, etc.

Wenger does offer up a noble idea of social theory, one worthy of a book, certainly. But the vignettes he hammered into the text as examples of communities of practice are excruciatingly dull. The stories smack of tedium and prohibit the working and open mind from grasping even slightest lessons he implies through stale, two-dimensional characters who babble on and on about the meaningless, grinding minutia of insurance claims and adjustments. Read the rest of this entry »