As compositionists, we can learn from encyclopedic enthusiasts, musicians, and news junkies who are testing the limits of new literacy tools. We need to revise our courses and practices to better account for the demands of new collaborative literacies. Because environments like the ones we listed above thrive all over the Internet, we should encourage our students to write in them; we can use social networking tools to move away from the "teacher as examiner" audience and the arhetorical, busywork that has undermined our efforts. Within communities like the ones described above, students can write documents for tangible audiences, which can often lead to a greater sense of accountability on the part of the author.

In the early 80s, Bruffee suggested that knowledge was constructed collaboratively, but he probably never conceived of the ways new writing tools would transform collaborative practices. Today, collaboration vacillates like a large ocean wave: occasionally its outer rings kiss the shoreline and give us a glimpse into the future, but like all waves, collaboration all too often recedes in the face of dissenters who see it as a threat to authorship and copyright. The collaborative wave, empowered by social networking communities that democratically construct and create knowledge, is today challenging the traditional notion of the solitary writer.

At the University of South Florida we have been exploring how we can use collaborative tools to engage approximately 90 writing instructors in an online effort to develop our curriculum, a curriculum that is offered to approximately 9,500 students each year. For the past four years, we have experimented with a variety of software tools, including Sharepoint, Flexwiki, and Community Server (for blogs and discussion forums designed to facilitate collaboration and social networking). We have characterized our work as datagogical. By this we mean that we are exploring how "databases" can inform our "pedagogies."

Where are we collaborating?