Assignment 1: research scenario

During the last years, many research efforts have been made in order to study collaborative writing and to analyze its social dimension. The focus on aspects such as, writing strategies adopted during the task, division and distribution of work, negotiation problems, sharing resources and exchanging comments are just a few examples. In terms of macro-structure, collaborative writing is analogous to individual writing, as planning translating and reviewing can still be considered as the main constituent stages. The three phases serve the same goals as for solo writing, although co-writers have to cope with additional issues related to social dimension of collaboration. Other research efforts in collaborative writing have focused on reviewing practices; the range of technology that people use to co-write documents; comparative studies of face-to-face and computer mediated collaborative writing. Despite thorough and detailed, these studies look at collaborative writing through couples of dichotomies, such as synchronous versus asynchronous strategies, face-toface versus at distance strategies. Very little is said about: (i) how these strategies are intertwined; (ii) how and why people shift from face-to-face to distance working sessions; (iii) what are the affects on the writing activity; how this relates and is affected by the tools available to writers. Nevertheless, a previous studied carried out in order to study student group work, has highlighted a different scenario. As emerged from the study, in between those opposites there is a variety of ways in which collaborative writing takes place. Modalities of interactions, tools used and strategies differ depending on the places where collaborative writing takes place. During this study, it was noticed that this phenomenon was partially related to the students’ lack of a stable and fixed place (nomadicity).