The Open Source Model and Real World Collaborative Pedagogy
with co-author Brendan Riley
For writing pedagogy to disrupt the capitalist system that effectively obscures itself, it should engage with methods of production as well as content. This presentation suggests that instructors use the Open Source development model for classroom production, enabling students to create collaborative interventionist projects with real world applications. Open Source development is a peer review process by which programmers work togther to design, implement, and test software. Open source is an important model because it explicitly opposes itself to traditional industrial development by relying on truly collaborative work and pooled resources.
Research and experience show that students tend to produce collaborative work in methods not unlike the assembly line. We suggest that students can awake from the anesthesia of academic production by learning other methods. In writing classes, Open Source provides an alternate model for collaborative work that predicates on the individual as co-developer. Our presentation addresses using Open Source in the composition classroom as both a method and an argument for practical projects that intervene in real world situations. We touch on previous implementations of such strategies and offer some of our own for the future.