This paper attempts to understand the culture of collaborative attempts of language academicians who are members of communities of practice who share common professional activities. Participants of these communities of practice engage in a variety forms of collaborative attempts which include knowledge sharing via traditional means; conducting research, team teaching, mentoring, writing books a...

This article discusses an undergraduate secondlanguage writing course that incorporated web conferencing. The study was informed by a sociocultural research approach known as activity theory [2]. Student reflective diary entries posted over ten weeks to the web conference helped identify features that supported or detracted from collaboration, peer evaluation and the coconstruction of academic ...

Instant messaging applications that convey presence awareness are quickly becoming some of the most popular groupware applications. They support lightweight and intermittent interactions that allow users to qiiickly move between a personal and a collective space, thus blurring the traditional distinction behveen synchronous and asynchronous systems. 'Often, however, the focus of collaboration i...

Writing, particularly collaborative writing is a commonly needed skill. Investigating how ideas and concepts are developed during the process of writing can be used to improve not only the quality of the written documents but more importantly the writing skills of those involved. In this paper, process mining is used to analyze the process that groups of writers follow, and how the process corr...

Adessowiki is a collaborative platform for scientific programming and document writing. It is a wiki environment that carries simultaneously documentation, programming code and results of its execution without any software configuration such as compilers, libraries and special tools at the client side. This combination of a collaborative wiki environment, central server and execution of code at...

Software describes an imagined machine. To be software, the description must be executable, which means written so a computer can animate it. Non-executable descriptions (specifications, designs, &c.) are instrumental to this work; they are intermediate texts. We advance a model of software development as the collaborative writing of a series of descriptions. We propose the chief distinction of...

In order to use groupware applications effectively a sense of workspace awareness is required. Distortion oriented visualisation techniques, such as fisheye lenses, have been proposed as a means of achieving this awareness. These techniques have been demonstrated in point systems but there is a need to test their effectiveness in 'real' applications. DOME is a collaborative writing system writt...

In the COSAR-project a computer-supported collaborative learning environment enables students to collaborate in writing an argumentative essay. The TC3 groupware environment (TC3: Text Composer, Computer supported and Collaborative) offers access to relevant information sources, a private notepad, a chat facility including a chat history, and a shared wordprocessor. Planning tools for writing –...

Synchronisation of replicated shared data is a key issue in collaborative writing systems. Most existing synchronization tools are specific to a particular type of shared data, i.e. text files, calendars, XML files. Therefore, users must use different tools to maintain their different copies up-to-date. In this paper we propose a generic synchronization framework based on the operational transf...