Communication and Shared Understanding in Collaborative Writing

Writing is a form of communication. Writing together is a process of negotiating for content and meaning of a text. Tools to support collaborative writing must take into consideration the communication which takes place both around and through the text. An extended field study of two groups of four grade six students was carried out to explore the impact of a shared text editor on communication and writing during synchronous collaborative writing. Analysis of the students' interactions shows that a shared editor affects control of discourse, the pursuit of attention, and the development of the common ground essential for shared understanding between collaborating authors. These observations suggest that effective collaborative writing technology needs to satisfy design requirements in the areas of concurrency control, awareness, and shared task spaces. These design requirements were explored through the development of Calliope, a prototype synchronous collaborative writing tool built using the GroupKit groupware toolkit.