Implementing Collaborative Projects in the Technical Writing Classroom

Scholars in the field of technical communication have frequently remarked on the collaborative nature of many engineering projects, and they have also extolled the merit of introducing this kind of writing into the technical writing classroom. But the problem of implementing collaborative projects in the classroom has not yet been satisfactorily addressed, nor have many solutions to the problem been workable in the context of the classroom. This paper, after defining what collaboration means, will outline some of the problems and some of the solutions. Later in the paper, I will briefly discuss two particular collaborative projects, writing an abstract and preparing an oral report.