Written Group Assignments – Experiences with Collaborative Web-spaces

1 H.L Jian, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, Ta Hsueh Road, Tainan City 70101, Taiwan 2 F. E. Sandnes, Oslo University College, Faculty of Engineering, Cort Adelers gate 30, N-0254 Oslo, Norway, [email protected] Abstract  The cultivation of writing skills is often absent from the syllabus of engineering programmes, despite engineers’ apparent exposure to documentation. This is especially a pressing issue in non-English speaking countries including most European and Asian countries, where a large number of organisations have an English language policy for their in-house documentation. English is the de facto means of business-to-business communication even between non-English speaking countries. This paper describes experiments carried out with collaborative web spaces in a teaching environment to catalyse the writing process with the intention to enhance the writing skills of the students. Collaborative web spaces are shared work canvases on the web accessible by groups of students. Students can therefore simultaneously work on the same piece of writing making amendments to the document. All alterations, additions and deletions are logged making it possible to trace who did what and when. The document evolves over time and the opinions and modifications of all the active group members are incorporated into the final product. The document interaction logs were used to evaluate the respective involvement of the group members. Further, the self-regulating mechanisms of group activity and peer-review reduce the workload of the instructors as only minimal inspection is required to monitor the works indetail.