High school teachers looking for a place that students can publish their work might want to consider High School Online Collaborative Writing. In any event, it’s interesting to browse. The site has been up since January ‘05, founded by a teacher from New York, Paul Allison. The mission statement says:

High school collaborative online writing is a Wikicity for use by schools. This wiki has the aim of promoting collaborative writing and providing a test area where students can do that. Teachers are invited to set up school projects within the wiki. There are no set criteria for the content.

One of the interesting things about this site is that there seems to have been an attempt to have teachers and kids publishing alongside each other. The kids wrote the kinds of things that kids write about at school. The teachers wrote a few articles about the kids’ writing. I don’t get the “collaborative” part, though. Maybe somebody can explain it to me. When I think of collaboration I imagine a joint undertaking in which goals are mutually shared.

An authentically collaborative website might be set up by students for their own purposes and then somehow a bunch of adults would have to be induced to participate with them…to…uh… Forget it; cancel that. It’ll never happen.