Collaboration

Collaboration The ability to collaborate is a crucial real-world skill, and I would like to encourage collaboration. You will be given bonus points for each assignment (except the first one) you collaborate with one or two of your classmates.

The following conditions apply:
 * You must establish teams on your own.
 * All team members must participate substantially in the project. This must be true collaboration at every step of the way: you may not simply split the work in half or thirds and combine the pieces at the end ("Mary, you do four paragraphs; Bill, you do four; and I'll do four").
 * Teams must work out suitable methods of communications and collaboration: IM, texting, email, etc. This is a bigger problem than you might expect, so you must have procedures in place. Contact me for suggestions.
 * You must indicate your intention to collaborate well ahead of time, before you start a particular project.
 * You must have a **group conference** with me on your draft, i.e., all members must schedule a single time to meet with me online. Group conferences will take place using my ooVoo meeting room (unless all members have Macs, unlikely but I suppose possible)—group video chats are ideal, provided all members have a webcam. Otherwise, we can do group mixed audio/video or even audio chats.
 * To begin, one person should start the draft in GoogleDocs and share it with the other members of the team and the instructor. Remember, **the Assignment Number and the names of all participants must appear at the top of the document.** All members must participate in the drafting, revising, and editing more or less equally.
 * The Multimodal Essay presents special challenges for collaborators. We will deal with that essay on a case by case basis.
 * All members will receive the same grade.