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Student using collaborative writing tools in Phelps Classroom
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Technology Spotlight: Digital Technology for Collaborative Writing Faculty use collaborative writing tools to encourage peer editing and facilitate instructor feedback during the writing process. |
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A Short History of Collaborative Writing Technology Use at Yale Yale faculty have been experimenting with collaborative writing software for over five years. Writing instructors, particularly during summer school, regularly brought classes into Phelps classroom to use the "Aspects" software package, which permitted several students to collaborate on the composition of one document in a variety of ways - e.g. taking turns to write, all writing on their own paragraphs simultaneously and having a chat window to discuss the document. In the Fall of 1996 William F Buckley taught a college seminar writing course during which he would project from his laptop computer to a large screen. He loaded the student writings (from a floppy disk!) and would open them on a split screen in Wordstar. With participation from the class he would edit and annotate a document, and print out the comments for distribution to the students. Although one could see the comments side by side on the screen during the class, the connection between comments and original text was lost in print form.In Fall of 1997 Mr Buckley began to use the CommonSpace package, which enabled side-by-side editing and saving of the revised documents for student access after class. With CommonSpace the side-by-side comments were preserved and students could easily revise their original work. Professor Elizabeth Guzman's "Advanced Composition in Spanish" (1998-99) was designed to help students perfect their writing skills in Spanish as a foreign language through systematic hands-on practice. Composing in Spanish was seen as a process, therefore, learners were expected to concentrate on improving their communication skills in writing through conferencing, peer editing, planning, revising, and editing of their work and that of others. Using CommonSpace software, students composed (with the aid of the built-in spelling checker, thesaurus and dictionary) and then reviewed each other's work. Professor Guzman commented "Teaching Advanced Composition in Spanish with CommonSpace has been a blessing to me as an instructor. Firstly, it helps dramatically improve students' fluency. Time is better spent, revising and editing not having to hand write the original text, but simply making the necessary changes to convey a clearer message to a wide range of readers. Secondly, CommonSpace provides me with the wonderful opportunity to compare the various drafts of a student's piece of writing and analyze the strategies individual learners have used to solve their rhetorical, linguistic, and mechanical problems." In Michelle Fleming's English 118b class (1998-99), "Writing Across the University," students worked on styles and types of writing as varied as literary criticism, behavioral observation reports, and abstracts of scientific papers. Professor Fleming used a laptop computer and projector to engage the class in a discussion of student essays that had been downloaded to the computer. To focus the attention of the class, each essay was projected to a large screen, while a student "CommonSpace operator" recorded the class's revision and editing suggestions during the ongoing discussion. These annotated documents were available on-line for further review outside of the classroom. Collaboration in English 114 Paula Resch, English 114 Course Director, was interested in Michelle Fleming's observations that the final papers of students whose work had been critiqued with CommonSpace software showed greater improvement than those who received feedback in the traditional way. She introduced the use of this technology in four sections of English 114 (Reading and Writing Prose). These classes use CommonSpace software and interactive class web sites to foster collaborative writing. As described by Professor Resch, these enhancements include: o web pages that allow students to link to several sites, including ones that provide some information more effectively than the handbooks usually used in the course; o CommonSpace collaborative writing software for peer critiques as well as writing instruction in general; o papers written and posted in response to the course readings prior to class discussion of them; o sample papers posted by instructors and read by students to understand the type of paper that meets their instructor's criteria; o in-class evaluation of Internet sites to determine whether or not they are acceptable for use in a research paper; o communications outside of class (using the classes.yale.edu resources for email, chat and newsgroups) such as posting sources they find helpful for class discussion, raising questions, and participating in chat rooms at designated times with their instructors. While aware of the controversies surrounding the use of technology in instruction, Professor Resch feels that it is important for English students to learn to look critically at how computers shape their experience and how they are capable of shaping the discourse of their age by using this technology. She is also the recipient of an Instructional Innovation Grant to determine the extent to which the techniques and activities described above result in improved student writing. For more information on how these tools are being used, visit the English 114 sections on classes.yale.edu.
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Collaborative Writing: Footnotes
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