The very nature of academic writing itself limits the extent of collaborative efforts. The research necessary for any scholarly project is often a solitary endeavor, where students guard their sources closely for fear of appropriation or, worse, accusation of plagiarism. When sources are shared between peers, it is done on a limited basis through active, concentrated efforts, an extra task that many students would be reluctant to take on unless asked by a friend. Again, the humanities class can borrow a page from the internet to solve this problem of collaborative scarcity: the GNU project, an open source movement founded on the open exchange of software states its ethos as follows: “Free software means users have the four essential freedoms: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily” (GNU Project).

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In an online classroom, students can adopt a similar approach with their research efforts. Rather than handing an annotated bibliography in to the teacher, for example, the digital student can upload the document to a class discussion board for use by other students. If all work is posted openly and anonymously, the students will not need to go through any extra effort to share their work. The success of this source sharing depends on the structure of the assignments, however. Standard research or argumentative essays utilizing this approach are likely to produce bland, repetitive work. If, on the other hand, the course follows Wysocki’s argument that “we ought to use the range of choices digital technologies seem to give us to consider the range of choices that printing press technologies (apparently) haven’t” (10) and design assignments that encourage subjectivity, interpretation, and critical engagement with the medium of digital composition itself, this method of open-source research will allow a wider range of access to information and ideas that no single student could hope to accumulate.