Martha Groom, a professor at University of Washington Bothell used Wikipedia to rethink the research paper. She had students either create or revise an article, and she built some other assignments around it (pre-writing, a reflective essay, etc.)

It seems to have gone over well. Only one student over two semesters reported a "negative" experience (not too many details here...), and there were some minor issues with "rudeness" on the part of Wikipedians. This isn't too surprising. Others have reported this in the past - some Wikipedians guard their territory very aggressively. Some of the articles were deleted and others were incorporated into existing articles.

Overall, this seems like a well-designed assignment. Students participated in a tutorial and were tasked with learning how the community worked prior to writing anything. One student remarked about how "real" the experience seemed (this quote is included in Groom's PowerPoint presentation):

“This assignment felt so Real! I had not thought that anything I wrote was worth others reading before, but now I think what I contributed was useful, and I’m glad other people can gain from my research.”

While this is a great response, it signals to me that we really have cut off writing from "the wild" (as Ed Hutchins might say). Why is the "school paper" so "unReal" and not worth reading. What purpose does student writing serve if they envision it as having an audience of one (teacher)?

These are issues I've been trying to work through in a dissertation chapter on Intellectual Property. How does this notion of the "school paper" as insignificant work when modes of delivery are changing? How are particular modes of delivery linked with ideas of intellectual property? Most would acknowledge that our notions of intellectual property are changing (or are should be changing), but have we considered enough how much the fifth canon needs to change? There has been a good bit of research in rhet/comp. on delivery recently, and I'm thinking through this resurgence of the fifth canon in terms of intellectual property and what Cynthia Haynes has called (in a comment on the Blogora) the "platform" of delivery. In oral delivery, this platform is (seemingly) simple. Here "I" am...I am delivering this speech. I am present. If the authors of electronic texts cannot rest on being/essence, then they are not delivering from a platform. Instead, they are participating in an ongoing process of circulation - something John Trimbur worked through in CCC article a few years back. If circulation is the "new delivery," how are we to rethink both delivery and intellectual property? If we are re-circulating (remixing, remaking) texts, intellectual property needs to be redefined and so does delivery.

Groom's assignment is a great example of students who stepped into a process of circulation. Even those who created new articles were joining an existing conversation, and those who were editing articles were even moreso joining the circulatory system of Wikipedia. This seems to be much more useful than asking/forcing students to create from scratch. Even if we teach them that they're not starting from scratch - that they are patching together other texts, citing other sources, synthesizing information - they still think that "writing" is something they create, from scratch, ex nihilo. Electronic environments offer us some ways make it clear to students that writers never ever create something from nothing.