Collaborative writing

Idea

In a collaborative community each participant has the same opportunities to add text, edit or remove ( egalitarian approach). The process of writing is in any change to the text draws to a recursive function that changes by the members of the collaborative community after himself. The collaborative writing presupposes that the participants perform a lively discourse and know about the purpose of their text clear.

Software solutions

There are now a variety of programs with which you can work collaboratively on texts. Well-known examples of programs that installs each of the participants in and which are synchronized through a server are:

  • Gobby is a cross-platform open-source project, which has been released as free software
  • SubEthaEdit (Mac OS X and commercial)
  • ACE - platform independent, collaborative text editor
  • MoonEdit (Linux, Windows, FreeBSD) provides basic collaborative editing

May differ from these "stand-alone " programs you browser or web-based programs that do not require local installation. These include in particular online word processing programs such as Google Drive, Verbosus (LaTeX ), Adobe Buzzword, Microsoft Office Live, or ThinkFree Office. Many smaller companies also make use of online text editors such as EtherPad.

For specialized applications, there are now some attempts to enable collaborative editing:

  • GNU Screen allows multiple users to share a console window; however, the cursor must be shared.
  • Mind42 Allow sharing editing of mind maps
  • Eclipse Communication Framework and Saros enable collaborative programming in Eclipse (IDE).
  • Mozilla Bespin An early experimental prototype of a collaborative editor, especially for collaborative programming of websites in PHP or HTML
  • Instant Review for Visual Studio enables collaborative programming in real-time for Visual Studio

Didactic perspective

Cooperative or collaborative writing can not tie in different ways to the curricular requirements, for example, the subject German. So the demand of educational standards is called to raise awareness of the writing process (KMK 2003, p.12) to train or addressee -oriented authoring (p. 9).

The collaborative writing as part of the area of cooperative learning is in German didactic discourse as well as in general didactic a much discussed concept. Compared to the individual learning and frontal teaching methods, cooperative learning has proven in terms of knowledge acquisition, learning progress, learning motivation and attitude towards the subject as superior.

Collaborative writing, so Lean has shown " [ brings ] the individual writing skills and strategies of the participants in a special way to light " ( Lean, 2000: 257). This is because the condition of cooperation leads to the need to verbalize ideas, thoughts, writing habits and strategies, and thus the interaction (and thus also of detection ) to make available (see Lean 2000: 2ff, 1999: 77 ). The reflection of your procedure can help to ensure that pupils ' exercise and monitor their writing process more effectively. " ( Journal, 1999: 226) pupils learn the joint letter early the perspective of writer and reader to consider ( Becker- Mrotzek / Böttcher 2006: 43).

Write experienced writer together with less experienced writers, this can especially among beginners writing to an increase in reading and reception skills and ability to lead the formulation (see Lean 2000: 257). Serves collaborative text production in a media environment, there are good conditions to ensure that the participants are also encouraged to medial reflections (see Lean 1999: 88).

Relevant patents and patent applications

Important documents:

  • Thought Linger U.S. patent number 7249314 published in July 2007
  • Microsoft U.S. patent number 6574674 published in June 2003
  • IBM U.S. patent number 6192368 published in February 2001
  • Sequoia U.S. patent number 7877460 published in January 2011
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