Groupthink. Not in the Orwellian sense, though . . . I asked students to look at a brief informative posting and talk about the choices the writer had made and what other interesting choices might be made in revising the piece. The individual answers were, I thought, all good, but they added up to a very sharp look at the posting and how it might be revised. By staying with it for awhile, the group saw more about the piece than any one or two of us did, that's for sure.

Perhaps this is a lesson for future work with student sites: collaborative and deliberative editing by students might reach a very high level of skill. If so, we should expect that, work toward it, support it, have some faith in the process, stay involved and help out. And if the editing can be that good, then the writing might be spurred on to a high level too.

There appears to be no reason to aim for anything less than excellent web writing by our students, then. No need to condescend, to give up, to lose faith. [0 & P]