You mention the stereotypical vision of the scholar in splendid isolation with his or her books. This is a particular paradigm that I’m interested in challenging. One of my THATCamp proposals involves adapting or developing an annotation tool for collaborative critical reading. Existing software such as CommentPress (www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/) or Adobe Buzzword (www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/) provide some but not all the features that I envision for this project. The aim is to leverage the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing by fostering critical reading skills that encourage students to examine how scholars structure and develop their arguments and, in turn, to think more critically about their own writing. The difference between this idea and, say, having students blog about what they are reading is that the tool would make students’ observations about the text–and the text itself–visible in the same shared space, inviting close re-examination of the text.

Goals include:

•Transform reading from a solitary activity with no feedback mechanisms to a collaborative learning activity.

•Help students to strengthen their critical reading skills: understand how arguments are structured, use of rhetoric, conception of audience, etc. Transfer this knowledge to creation of students’ own written work. Peer-learning: shift from many-to-one to a many-to-many model, create space for low-risk participation and carry momentum over to classroom discussion.

So, the issues of how to create the setting for successful collaboration and group work pertain to my project as well—even though it in itself may be more tangential to the interests of the topic as you propose it. I’m interested, too, in facilitating other collaborative work, such as you’ve all written about here.

Maybe instead of the term “collaborative literacy” we just use “collaborative practice,” evoking the apprenticeship model underlying Lave and Wenger’s notion of communities of practice.