Placeholder for publishing a version of my dissertation manuscript.

elearnspace links to Barbara Gross Davis's Tools for Teaching: Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams. Could be a good resource for getting teachers thinking about collaborative learning.

Side note: One of the things I looked for in the bibliography was Kenneth Bruffee. I haven't researched that much on collaborative learning outside of Rhet/Comp, but in what I have seen, I never see any of his work mentioned. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" was a pivotal work for me (and our field).

Just a quick note about VOIP: Until Gordon Cook's article at strategy+business, I didn't know that Skype was founded by the creators of Kazaa. But I was glad to see a confirmation of the trend I suspected, of Skype being used by small businesses, as well as a substitute for IM. IMHO, the IM tool in Skype is equally useful for asynch text communication with the ability to just jump on VOIP when extra bandwidth is needed for communication.

Dries and I have been working on an article which examines the social software features and social nature of Drupa. A work-in-progress version is available as part of the Computers and Writing Online 2005 Conference.

Kairosnews is hosting this year's Computers and Writing Online. CFP follows:

CFP: Computers and Writing Online 2005

When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration

David Reed explains that in the early stages of a network's formation and growth, that “content is king,” that there are a “a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from" (qtd in Rheingold Smart Mobs 61). As the network scales, “group-forming networks” occur, and the value of the network increases exponentially in relationship of the number of users, otherwise known as Reed's Law, privileging the social interaction over content.

We can see this change in network valuation in today's Internet. The increased valuing of social interaction in large scale networks is reflected in the new technologies that place emphasis on social communication and community over content. These technologies, often dubbed “social software” are applications that, as Clay Shirky explains, “support group interaction.”

We invite proposals from scholars, graduate students and others who have an interest in computers and writing and social interactions and are working on projects in gestation, in progress, near completion, or at any stage in between, whether a thesis or dissertation, article, book project, or just want to preview and fine-tune your conference presentation for Computers and Writing Conference hosted by Stanford University. This is a unique opportunity for extended discussion of your ideas before heading to Palo Alto. Conference organizers are particularly interested in presentations that address, but are not limited to, the following concerns:

Last week, I gave a presentation, Open Source/Open Access as Social Constructionist Epistemology, at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. There's also an OpenOffice presentation version that is CC licensed.