ABSTRACT
Nardi and O’Day (1999) suggest that “it is in the spaces between things-where people
move from place to place, talk, carry pieces of paper, type, play messages, pick up the
telephone, send faxes, have meetings, and go to lunch-that critical and often invisible
things happen” (p. 66). Their concern was to foreground the ways in which tech-
nologies and activities contribute to social practices and norms where significant
interactions are often invisible. This chapter begins from the premise that student
collaboration in professional and technical writing courses will often involve inter-
actions in the spaces between classes, study sessions, work, and play, and that the
particular affordances and proliferation of social software and Web-based communi-
cation (Spinuzzi, 2009) suggest that much of that collaboration is taking place in
writing activities that can be aggregated and made visible in new and productive ways.
In this sense, we are interested in how curricular and pedagogical instantiations of
new and widely available enabling technologies such as Google Wave can improve
student collaboration by making such work more intentional and visible-by bringing
together in one environment much of the critical collaborative work that has been
previously fragmented or even invisible.
