Case Story: CollaborativeDocumentWritingAndCPD

Summary	Exploring tools for collaborative authoring as part of continuing professional development
Group / workshop	Making stuff together	Status	seed
Project details...	Not project specific - part of day to day practice in OdinLab, SSE, University of Reading

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

As researchers and developers in the field of eLearning and collaboration, we are constantly finding new tools.  We also have a real need to be able to work together as a team to author documents, sometimes on an equal footing (each contributing from areas of expertise, for instance) and sometimes in a more structured, role based way (with someone taking lead, and others acting as editors, or specialist contributors, for example)

As a result, we are often in the position of learning about new tools whilst using them for production purposes and evaluating their utility to us.

The group are all IT literate, and are all used to using a variety of different tools.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The specific task was to utilise web based tools to produce a book chapter.  The technologies under 'trial' at the time were Sharepoint, GoogleGroups, GoogleDocs and Zoho.

A sub-task was to evaluate the technologies and use the one(s) best suited to the main task.

In this instance the group consisted of 4 people.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Initially the document was created as a set of pages within a GoogleGroup.  However, as the document became quite long, it naturally tended to be developed in one 'page' (where the flow of ideas was most prolific and coherent) and it was found that long pages become unwieldy (formatting becomes an issue, and time to edit a page becomes unnacceptable)

The document was then developed briefly in both GoogleDocs and Zoho, but whilst the actual tasks of editing were easier in both, various members of the group were unhappy to find that their edits had been lost on occasion.

The development ended up being back on 'trustworthy' PCs with copies being saved to the Files area of a GoogleGroup (this was preferred to the sharepoint option on grounds of ease of access - the group name was easier to remember than the sharepoint URL)

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Decisions were made by individuals, rather than by the group in a 'team meeting' or similar.  Essentially, if someone found an environment too awkward to use, or became frustrated by loss of data, they would move the development effort to a different platform, and explain the issues they had encountered.  As the functionality of each of the systems, and the 'final solution' are actually all remarkably similar, and the group members are all used to learning new systems, this did not have much of an overhead (but could be very confusing for less experienced learners)

[caveat - in other cases, we have found that 'evangelism' for a particular technology by individuals can mean this type of 'adhocratic' approach does not always work] 

Two of the team subsequently invested in web space to run their own version control software repositories - not, as one might expect, as shared resources within the group, but for version control of their own documents and of their working copies of group documents.

The main task was completed on time and to acceptable quality levels.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

Subsequent group reflection highlighted that some members considered that if a tool from, say, the Google stable is used, it makes sense to use all of them and not mix and match.  Others feel that picking the best of breed from each tool set makes more sense, and still others feel a 'good enough' approach is best, where you only discard a tool if it damages data/productivity.

Other attempts to use the same techniques of managing the authoring process across platforms has indicated that it becomes far less appropriate with increasing numbers.

We became aware that we had used different criteria (over time, as well as between individuals) in our assessments of the technologies, and that a framework for evaluation would be useful in future.

Licensing

This document has not been assigned a license.