Collaborative writing in a digital environment

This paper offers a Burkean framework for study of collaborative business writing. It begins with a review of the research and scholarship on collaborative writing by com position and by business and technical communication specialists. Then it explains a Burkean framework that identifies key areas for future investigation and provides categories for conducting research. Finally, it argues for a research agenda that em phasizes qualitative studies first, to be followed by quantitative research.

Even if research on online collaborative writing is largely abundant, studies on the effects of varied digital collaborative tools applied to different stages of process writing are limited. This paper, therefore, presents the findings of a quasi-experimental study on the effects of three Web 2.0-based collaborative writing tools on university English language students’ writing performance and motivation. A one-group within-subjects quasi-experimental repeated-measures time series design was employed. Sixteen University students were comprehensively selected. Data were collected over four rounds using writing performance tests and a motivation questionnaire. The Friedman test was utilized to compare the mean scores of the related samples. Additionally, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance was calculated to determine the concordance in the rating. The results revealed that Web 2.0-based collaborative writing had a statistically significant effect on students’ writing performance and motivation when applied to the different stages of process writing. Therefore, it is essential for teachers, schools, and curriculum designers to make a concerted effort to integrate Web 2.0 writing tools for collaborative writing. 

Collaborative writing has been a common activity in different professions for many years. Researchers from multiple disciplines, including from HCI and CSCW, have experimented and evaluated a number of collaborative writing tools. However, with the emergence of more modern technologies like cloud-based Google Docs, newer versions of Microsoft Word etc., collaborative writing practices are gaining in popularity and use. Yet, we know little about the accessibility of these systems and how they should be designed to best support the increasingly common collaborative practices that constitute everyday work groups and collaboration. Our research goal is to study how people with visual impairments collaboratively write with other sighted and/or visually impaired peers in practice, whether and how they use computer-mediated collaborative tools, and design new assistive technologies to facilitate collaboration among a group of writers with visual impairments or mixed abilities.

Writing and collaboration are crucial skills in professional and academic settings. However, assessments of collaborative writing often focus only on the final text, overlooking individual contributions and the diverse strategies students employ during the writing process. To support teachers in interpreting and assessing student behaviour, we propose analysing writing data at a granular level, down to individual characters, and using user sessions as observation units to capture coherent interaction patterns. This paper introduces three methods for identifying interaction patterns in collaborative writing. The first method classifies session types by analysing features such as writing, reading, and communication behaviours, session length, and the number of group members collaborating synchronously. The second method identifies frequent sequences of session types by examining their order, enabling process analyses at an abstract yet manageable level compared to using log data. The third method focuses on text-level collaboration by evaluating the frequency of text passage modifications made by the original author or other group members. This approach quantifies individual collaboration and, at the group level, identifies isolated versus closely connected group members, shedding light on the mode of collaboration and degree of group cohesion. We demonstrate these three methods in a case study involving two cohorts, K A = 294 and K B = 242 groups of up to 9 learners (N A = 1, 848, N B = 1, 463). The interaction patterns identified using these methods are intended to help teachers understand collaborative writing processes and identify situations where the participating learners require support.

As online education grows in popularity, the literature on such courses has expanded as dramatically. However, discussion of online tools specifically for composition instruction has received far less attention than general course-management systems and online discussion forums. The composition process has changed with the advent of computer processing, yet composition research rarely focuses on the advantages of the digital composition process. That process could change again with recent developments in social systems and networked, cloud-based applications. This article highlights the way online composition platforms can meet the needs of writing courses. New tools can provide new opportunities for student collaboration, teacher involvement, and writing-process research. This article uses Sally J. McMillan’s model of Cyber-Interactivity and Robert R. Johnson’s model of User-Centered Design as frameworks in which to view collaborative writing, arguing that students in online composition courses need collaborative tools that allow a single document to be created by a student, edited by others, and commented on by all. The ill-fated Google Wave platform is evaluated through this perspective. Practical benefits of the platform and implications for writing instruction are included. Collaborative online composition, using systems with features like Google Wave, is presented as essential in modern composition courses.

Whether a mind forms in large-group writing in the workplace is the focus of this article originally given as the 1998 ABC Outstanding Researcher Lecture. This article is based on a five-year ethnographic study that describes and analyzes a three-month group writing process that created a computer service-level agreement, involving a 20-person cross-functional core more than 100 other collaborators at a major corporation. The article discusses collective in two senses: First, a document's evolving form or superstructure produced a schema that allowed the group through a process of equilibration (Piaget, 1981) to adopt outsider boilerplate into a more situated general model and then into a situated document. Second, architectural forms motivated and molded group activity in several ways. To combat group apathy, the leaders appropriated an in-demand meeting room for the project, positioning the project as high-status in the center of the workflow. Group leaders prominently displayed a task completion check-off chart that, in a downsizing environment, helped both to coordinate group activity and to encourage completion. Keywords: Collaborative Writing, Collective Mind, Cross-functional Groups, Large Group, Team Management. Trends ends in business and government affect the very nature of writing in those environments, as Tebeaux has noted (1996). One of the most widespread and genuinely altering trends, brought on by global competition, is the move in the 1980's and 1990's of U.S. companies from taskfocused to process-focused management, often through the managerial approaches of total quality management and/or reengineering. For example, the tasks involved in order fulfillment, such as taking the order, entering it into a database, checking the customer's credit, and so forth, are not in isolation valuable to the customer. Yet before process-focused management (and even today in too many cases), management focused only upon how many orders were taken, how many credit checks were conducted, and so forth, in isolation from the rest of the process. But only when these tasks are integrated do they create value (Hammer, 1996, p. 5). The continuous improvement or fundamental redesign of business processes in organizations requires much writing, first, to identify these complex processes; second, to design incremental or radical improvements; and third, to implement the changes. Because these business processes typically span many departments in a company, their documentation and adjustment or reinvention often creates the need for a large-group writing effort. Ede and Lunsford have defined group writing as writing done in collaboration with one or more persons (1990, pp. 15-16). Large-group dynamics begin when the number of group members exceeds 15-20, as Gilmore and Barnett note (1992, p. 539). Although researchers have studied many small collaborative writing groups, only two studies have focused upon any kind of large group collaborative writing (Mclsaac & Aschauer, 1990; Kleimann, 1989). Mclsaac and Aschauer discuss other important topics (e.g., writing in engineering and persuasive strategies) as much as they do large-group collaboration. Kleimann (1989) focuses upon the review of documents by large groups in the workplace. Thus no one has described in depth a collaboration in which a large group had input into the planning and/or writing that went into the first complete draft of a document. Beyond that, no study has described the training of leaders and their facilitation of concurrent collaborative subgroups working on a large document. Noting this incomplete information on large-group writing, Association of Business Communication Outstanding Researcher Janis Forman (1991, p. 247) called for more research in this area. This study begins to fill that gap. This article comes from a larger ethnographic study describing and analyzing a three-month group writing process involving a 20-person cross-functional core group and over 100 more than collaborators at Montmanche Corporation (pseudonym), a major corporation. …

This study aims to assess students' collaborative writing activities using Wiki as a tool, building upon the research conducted by Hadjerrouit. An optimized experimental plan was designed to enhance the research approach. The enhancements involved expanding the experimental sample size, implementing a control group, incorporating self-assessment links, and utilizing binary response formats. Prior to commencing the experiment, all participants underwent rigorous training and testing to mitigate potential confounding factors. Subsequently, the acquired experimental data was analyzed using the same methodology as Hadjerrouit to derive conclusive findings. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that the outcomes may be influenced by participants' learning abilities and the duration of the experiment, despite the ideal nature of the experimental plan.

This paper reports a study of a wiki-based collaborative writing project conducted between two Taiwanese universities. A total of 100 sophomore students from two English writing classes used the wiki with group members to collaboratively produce online picture books. The aims of the study were to examine student perception, their engagement in the project, and their overall writing development. Various sources of data, including the questionnaires, archived changes of wiki pages, and pre- and post-project essay writing scores were collected and analyzed. The results showed that students' general opinions toward the project were positive. Students particularly appreciated the experience of collaborating with peers. However, the students found it challenging to negotiate a common work schedule and to reach group agreement. Students' engagement in the collaborative writing project varied, due in large part to their diverse English proficiency levels. Specifically, more proficient English writers appeared to be more engaged in the writing tasks, while less proficient writers tended to contribute by offering story ideas and arranging layouts. In the end, students' writing skills on average improved more as a result of the frequent writing practice and peer editing tasks, rather than from the completion of the online picture books.

The purpose of the research is to consider the key interdisciplinary research and practice problems of the property turnover digitalisation and propose ways to solve them. Elements, phenomena and processes of the digital environment first appeared in the countries of the Anglo-Saxon legal family. By determining the constitutive features of them, the authors turned to classical domestic and foreign legal statutory concepts and policy management. The research was carried out by the comparative-legal method and modelling method. The identification of interdisciplinary research and practice problems as well as methods for solving them was based on the methods for ascent from the abstract to the concrete, induction and deduction. As a result of the implementation of the research objectives through the general scientific and private scientific methods described above, the authors identified the constitutive features of the key elements of property turnover in the digital environment, such as digital currency, smart contract, electronic trading. Identified were both doctrinal and practical problems associated with the essence and features of those elements, as well as the legal regulation of the associated relations. Those elements are considered in two dimensions, in the information system and legal field. In addition, significant gaps in the regulatory framework of the associated relations were identified; the impossibility of applying the classical regime of objects of civil rights and the rules of documentary circulation to digital objects and processes was substantiated. The novelty of the work consists in proposing ways to solve interdisciplinary theoretical and practical problems of the property turnover digitalisation, which are important for a wide range of academic researchers and practitioners in the legal field.

Academic writing, individual or collaborative, is an essential skill for today's graduates. Unfortunately, managing writing activities and providing feedback to students is very labor intensive and academics often opt out of including such learning experiences in their teaching. We describe the architecture for a new collaborative writing support environment used to embed such collaborative learning activities in engineering courses. iWrite provides tools for managing collaborative and individual writing assignments in large cohorts. It outsources the writing tools and the storage of student content to third party cloud-computing vendors (i.e., Google). We further describe how using machine learning and NLP techniques, the architecture provides automated feedback, automatic question generation, and process analysis features.

ResumoDiversos autores conceituam a Web 2.0como uma "ecologia complexa" a fim de apreender as novas configurações da esfera pública nas sociedades contemporâneas. Contudo, raros estudos desenvolvem uma caracterização sistemática da especificidade das condições de comunicação nos ambientes digitais. Este artigo tem por objetivo caracterizar, numa base comparativa, três espaços de conversação online: blogs, sitesde redes sociais (como o Facebook) e plataformas de conteúdo colaborativo (como o YouTube). A partir de uma exploração crítica da literatura corrente e de estudos empíricos, examinam-se as implicações da identificação dos participantes, o papel da moderação, a interatividade social e a natureza do público presumido. Tomando como pano de fundo as condições normativas para a deliberação, defende-se o argumento segundo o qual a relação entre o designe a organização dos espaços virtuais tem impactos específicos na configuração da argumentação e da conversação mediada. Como conclusão, indicamos algumas implicações da arquitetura técnica de distintas plataformas para pensar o ambiente complexo das conversações onlinesob uma perspectiva deliberacionista.

In the organizations that develop software, existing Process-centered Software Engineering Environments (PSEEs) provide a way to organize software production autonomously. However these environments are often unsuitable to support the development of huge projects that involve several other environments. This paper proposes a model of PSEE allowing to support collaborative joint software development projects.

Nonverbal immediacy, the set of communicative behaviors that reduce psychological distance between individuals, has been a cornerstone of instructional communication research for over half a century. However, the proliferation of online, hybrid, and blended learning environments has challenged traditional immediacy measurement, creating a need for a modernized tool. This study reports on the development and psychometric validation of the Virtual and Interpersonal Nonverbal Immediacy (VINI) Scale, a 12-item self-report instrument designed to measure instructor immediacy across contemporary learning modalities. The VINI Scale comprises two distinct but correlated factors: Physiological Immediacy (gestures, eye contact, vocal expressiveness, animated movement, body orientation, smiles) and Virtual Immediacy (emoji use, colorful visuals, embedded video, varied typography, interactive technology, collaborative tools). Virtual Immediacy is operationalized as technologically-mediated, design-based behaviors enacted in digital environments—particularly asynchronous online contexts—that signal instructor presence and engagement. Data were collected through a dual-framework design, capturing both learner observations of instructor behaviors (VINI-O, N = 447) and learner preferences for those behaviors (VINI-P, N = 295). Confirmatory factor analysis supported a first-order, two-factor model as optimal across both samples. Multi-group analyses established configural invariance across participant gender, instructor gender, and instructional method comparisons, with VINI-P achieving scalar invariance across instructional method, enabling meaningful comparisons between face-to-face and online contexts. The VINI Scale offers researchers a reliable and valid instrument to investigate modernized nonverbal immediacy and provides practitioners across educational, corporate, and health contexts with an evidence-based framework to enhance social presence and engagement in any learning environment.

Audiovisual co-creation has always had a pedagogical nature, which has been maintained in its adaptation to digital communication, although it is applied in different ways. This study analyses the pedagogical proposals in collaborative interactive non-fiction in the digital environment, and compares them with previous projects of participatory practices. As case studies we selected five interactive audiovisual projects that stand out for their educational intent and their preparation of teaching resources, and analyzed their pedagogical proposals. First, we looked at pedagogy in pre-digital or analogical collaborative creation, which was used to develop an original analytical table. We used this table to study the five collaborative projects through three identified categories. The results show that these categories continue in initiatives today, although the findings show a shift in the pedagogy about audiovisuals, particularly concerning the technical aspects, as well as a weakening of the connection between learning and participation in the collective production. Finally, we can highlight that combining educational practices with collaborative production on the Internet is important to increase citizen participation and give a social perspective to this audiovisual modality.

This paper outlines several cycles of first- and second-person inquiry that explore how two doctoral candidates developed reflexive capacity-in-action. We illustrate the essential developmental shifts we experienced while facilitating research co-inquiry groups, offering a joint reflection through the theoretical lens of shifting and loosening habitual patterns. We explore how habitus and implicit relational patterns serve as blueprints for how we engage with and co-construct our social and organisational realities. Building on Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry practices, we exemplify how research-practitioners can become aware of personal and cultural habituations that shape and constrain what we can hold in our awareness at any given moment. We present several cycles of reflection both in, and on action, beginning with our experiences as initiators of an Action Inquiry Group during our doctoral programme and the challenges we faced in extending this quality of inquiry beyond the research paradigm. Ultimately, we found that as action researchers, the specific practices described in this paper equipped us to better uphold the qualities of mutuality, integrity, and sustainability in collaborative projects within conventional contexts.