I promise my students that we will conduct all of the work in our class electronically including my distribution of handouts to them, their documents to me, tests, final assessments, and group work. This is in part because my students pay an additional fee to meet in a computer lab every week and I don’t think it would make sense for them to pay for the lab and not work on the computers. But the other reason for maintaining an electronic work-frame is that the work my students produce, especially on group projects, allows them to learn about group collaboration through a digital environment, which may be unlike the way they experience collaboration in other classes, but relevant to the workplace they’re about to enter.

One such assignment I give involves dividing up the class into groups of four and giving them a specific scenario for a feasibility report and then having them create that document and presentation over Google Docs. Students have to decide who writes what part of the document and whether or not they’ll create an additional presentation (likely through some form of slide ware) or if they’ll present straight off the finished report. I have all of my students pretend that they are employees for a small and locally owned orchard in Pennsylvania, which I base on my parents’ orchard in Minnesota. Using a mock-up of a real world scenario instead of a completely made up example allows me to better define the set of constraints for the students including the nature of the audience.

My students pursue a number of different tasks or new systems for the Orchard including buying a new pickup truck, erecting a deer fence, building a new shed, and investigating different forms of clean energy. The groups set up Google Docs accounts with one another and create and collaborate on the document in real-time. Students can see what other members of the group contribute to the document immediately while also verbally commenting on the material and negotiating a plan. Despite these technologies, however, the experience is not without conflict. Allen et al. comment on the experiences of group conflict they’ve noticed: “Group conflict, which many people fear may occur, did occur in all our respondents groups, ranging from a relatively minor conflict over the use of a particular term to major conflicts over research conclusions” (358).

The conflict as part of the work that stems from collaboration that Allen et al. noticed is not all unlike what happens in my classroom. In one group this summer, one of the students who was sitting on the far end of her group kept asking a particular group member for help understanding particular terms she was encountering like “torque” and “payload.” The other student’s responses were largely dismissive which lead to the first student becoming frustrated, feeling that she didn’t have an equal voice. I eventually intervened, but only lightly since I wanted the group to manage the conflict independent of my authority. Largely the group did create a clean and thorough document, but since the second student never became receptive to the other student’s questions or concerns with the project, his participation grade in the class was lowered.

In some ways, my decision to give a lowered grade stemmed out of Allen et al’s notion that “All members of a shared-document collaborative group have power within the group’s decision-making process and share responsibility for the resulting document . . . individual members are not free to make final decisions affecting the document without consulting the group but instead must go through the group process” (361). Since the outcome was largely affected by one member making decisions and not listening to the others (or at least one specific member of the group), I was not able to acknowledge his role as equal to others.

This is my own pedagogical decision and isn’t necessarily universal to all situations. I still question how to manage situations like these since, as Allen et al. notes, conflict does sometimes serve a purpose: “The statements from our respondents that conflict contributed to their creativity and to the quality of their final document are supported by other work done on group decision making and creativity” (360). This sometimes places us as teachers of technical writing in a strange situation: would it have been better to let my students fight it out and waited to see what happened or was I in the right place as a teacher in a classroom to stand up for my student whose opinions were being squashed by a student who refused to listen?

Perhaps the pedagogical answer is in collaboration itself. Even if technical writing in the workplace may lead to more creative documents after a good cathartic shouting match, as a teacher I am woven into the collaborative process and can’t ever step completely outside of what’s happening in my classroom. By intervening, I also offer a model to the students in the group to see how to resolve conflict and make each voice heard equally, allowing them to later be more functional collaborators in the shared documents they’ll work on outside of my classroom and outside of academia.