Electronic Versions of Collaborative Pedagogy: A Brief Survey

We begin by refusing a convention rampant in discussions of collaborative practice, that is, positioning oneself against the straw man of traditional, authoritarian, lecture-based, banking pedagogy. In examining the work of Ken Bruffee and similar scholarship in computers and writing, we found that everyone (including ourselves) uses progress narratives to establish their social constructionist credentials against the blighted epistemology of traditional, authoritarian models, which, as far as we can see, no one is defending. “Somebody’s out there,” sings Bob Dylan, “beating on a dead horse.”