CONCLUSIONS: SHARINGWRITING DOT NET
Reasons to imagine alternatives.
What happens if students produce papers not only for a grade, and not only for the use value of those papers, but for the consumption and circulation and re-use of a larger community? Class mobility can happen in the Marxian sense when people can collectively resist the appropriation of the surplus value they create: shared economic value counters the monopolistic ambitions of the Bill Gateses of the world. Teaching students the habits of valuing communal labor as well as individual labor will serve them well both in college and beyond.
What sharingwriting dot net might look like.
Imagine a searchable database of essays, different from turnitin.com in that all of the papers are licensed under
Creative Commons attribution-sharealike-noncommercial licenses, or even under public domain dedications; a completely open database of essays to which anyone -- not just students -- could contribute, revise, and remix; a database of essays with feedback and ratings like those of kuro5hin.org; a database of essays with category rankings and publishable personal favorites lists like those of amazon.com; a database of essays with change tracking and logging like that of wikipedia.org; a database of essays with a versioning system like that of open-source software development projects.
In a syllabus, what might and might not work with such a thing.
Benkler's concept of granularity indicates that commons-based peer production works best with small pieces, so perhaps this implies brief assignments: short essays or maybe "remixes" of longer essays. While commons-based peer production seems like an excellent solution for research-based essays and contributing to and remixing a body of already-existing topical research, more inward-looking pedagogical functions like those served by the personal essay or the end-of-semester writerly reflection may best left privately owned and not remixed or licensed for public use.
Composition has a unique imperative for openness as site of (nearly) universal textual production.
Via digital textual reproducibility, the academic gift economy can only grow. Why does this matter to writing teachers? Because first-year composition is the sole cross-institutional site where all students produce digitally reproducible texts. We're in the middle of it, where students make and exchange and circulate texts.
Student writing must be imagined as an irreducibly diverse and complex economic good, common or otherwise.
A commons-based economics of circulation might help us to think of ways back towards Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century concerns with the common good. In the writing classroom, students, peers, teachers, and authors find themselves in consistently dialectical relationships, where the lines of production and consumption are perpetually shifting.
Introduction: turnitin dot com
1. Writing as Process and Writing as Product
2. Neoclassical Economics and Marxian Economics
3. Market Transactions and Gift Transactions
4. Use Value and Exchange Value
Conclusion: sharingwriting dot net
Reasons to imagine alternatives.
What sharingwriting dot net might look like.
In your syllabus, what might and might not work with such a thing.
Composition has a unique imperative for openness as site of (nearly) universal textual production.
Student writing must be imagined as an irreducibly diverse and complex economic good, common or otherwise.