Originally Posted by roachboy

i would use group work in particular situations where the content of the course resonates with the fact of collective work--this is what enables me to play around with the rules of the game.

what i don't want is the sort of division of intellectual labor like what's been outlined above, in which someone gets assigned the role of being the Writer while others, usually exploiting one or another social advantage (assertiveness or whatever) gets to be the Idea Guy or whatever. i don't really care about the ability of students to replicate bureaucracies. so i'd use collective projects in upper-division courses, and would combine them with explorations of alternate formal possibilities that integrate analysis without themselves necessarily looking like analytic work in the conventional academic sense. this form of writing is severely limted and limiting, and once you know the game there's not alot of point in continually reinforcing it. do something else. think about form. think about graphics and text and how they'd interact, that sort of thing. make something.
so i would usually require intermedia projects which would vary in their format along with the contents--one sort of thing for, say, looking into social movements and another for working with sound and visuals.

it was endlessly surprising to me how conservative and plodding most undergraduates are with respect to form.
but that's another topic.