Collaborative Projects in Multimedia Production

This semester, the students in my Multimedia Production course produced two collaborative web fiction projects: Atlantic City Murder and In Search of the Jersey Devil. I'm still noticing many irritating typos, sentence structure problems, and syntax errors, which I anticipate the class members are diligently cleaning up in preparation for their final portfolio grade. Both projects turned out to be a bit . . . sillier . . . than I might have hoped, but I would describe them as pedagogically successful (most of my students had never built a webpage before taking the class, and now they all know the rudiments of XHTML and CSS). We had some difficulties as a class — we were in a PC lab on Tuesdays and a Mac lab on Thursdays, with different software configurations in each room. On the whole, however, the projects were a great experiment in the chaos of collaborative webmaking (and also fun).