As Internet-based applications become more prevalent and sophisticated, opportunities for collaborating online will continue to increase and offer more effective ways for people to work together to achieve their common goals.
In this post, I will discuss some of my experiences online collaboration, particularly as they relate to forums and chatrooms. I will also talk briefly about my experiences using co-ment and Writeboard, which allow groups to work collaboratively on documents.
In one of my prior technical communication classes, my classmates and I were required to analyze the usability of the documentation for a thesis and dissertation template to be used by graduate students at my school. After finishing the analysis, we then had to collectively write up our findings in a report suitable for submission to the Office of Graduate Studies. Before the report could be assembled, however, we had to establish, among ourselves, who would be in charge of which parts of the document. Prior to that, we had to determine how to divide up the labor so that each person got near-equal amounts of work. That task was left up to me and two other classmates.
Because we were the only three people to participate in the first scheduled Wimba chat, we got to determine how the work was to be divided and which parts we, ourselves, wanted to be in charge of (which was a nice little perk for the three of us). I should add that we used the audio-chat feature in Wimba to discuss the details of the project. Wimba also has text-based chat and screen-sharing features. Our professor had some difficulty getting the screen-sharing feature to work properly during a prior chat session, but the text-based chat option was used during later project chats when we had participants who did not have microphones that they could use with their computers.
At any rate, once we had determined the parts in which the work would be divided, we posted the list of available tasks in our class forum and let people post responses saying which part they wanted to be in charge of. We also used our class form to post our completed individual work and to comment on the work posted by others. Other Wimba chats were scheduled, as needed, to discuss our progress and air any concerns.
An interesting finding that we made toward the end of the collaboration process was that it is sometimes better to have two people, rather than one person, take on the role of "final editor." While the one person we had in that role did do a good job, our professor reviewed our final product and made suggestions for edits in each part of the report. If we had two people collaborate on the final editing process, perhaps we would have been able to reduce the number of edits that had to be made after the report was submitted to our professor.
Chatrooms, whether they support audio- or text-based chatting, may be the ideal way to brainstorm online. During one of the weekly text-based chat sessions in my iPhone app-development course, I, along with my professor and a few of my classmates, talked about possible app ideas. We were able to help each other refine our concepts and think of new ones, and it was, in my opinion, a very productive and fun hour. I sincerely doubt that we would have had the insights we did if we had tried to have our discussion in a forum, since real-time and immediate dialogue is a crucial part of the brainstorming process.
As I mentioned previously, online forums can be effective collaboration tools. They can be referenced at any point during a project, and they're a great way for team members to communicate when they can't all meet for a live chat. Even outside the context of collaboration, a group's forum can allow members to learn from one another and even provide sparks of inspiration. Getting another person's viewpoint on a topic can enable group members to see concepts in ways that they never would have otherwise, giving them the opportunity to have a more comprehensive view of a subject.
Similar in many ways to a forum is co-ment, a "Web-based text annotation" service that allows designated users to view a document, chose a passage to comment on, and write and respond to comments. A screenshot of this process in action appears below:
(check out the article...noticing a theme here?)
I should add that I was given only "commenter" privileges for this particular document and that this document represents my only experience with the co-ment service. Therefore, I cannot comment (no pun intended) directly on any other features or capabilities of the site.
My only real complaint about using co-ment.net is that it was difficult to read everyone's comments. I kept having to click links like "minimize" and "read," and it was hard to keep track of which comments I had already read. However, I liked that I could click on a highlighted passage and read the comments associated with it.
I also had the opportunity to try out Writeboard, which allows group members to edit a document, compare previous versions, and comment on the document and the changes they made to it. Here's a look at what the editing process was like:
(looks pretty straightforward, right?...it was.)
I liked the simplicity of the editing process: there wasn't too much formatting code for me to worry about messing up, and the large editing screen gave me a pretty accurate idea of what the document would look like after I saved my changes. I also thought the "Compare Versions" feature was very useful, and the comparisons were easy to interpret (with strikethroughs representing content that had been deleted, etc.).
One drawback of Writeboard is that it isn't "safe" for more than one person to edit the document at a time. On two occasions, when I tried to edit the current version, I got a message saying "Hold On! Someone's editing this Writeboard right now!" and telling me that it would be best if I waited to make my edits. If each person were required to make extensive edits to a Writeboard document, it would probably be beneficial to set an editing schedule of sorts to prevent two or more people from trying to edit the document at once. Of course, setting up such a schedule isn't the most convenient thing in the world. Such are the trade-offs of online collaboration.
Do you have any experiences with online collaboration that were particularly positive or negative? Have you collaborated in other platforms besides the ones mentioned here? Comments are welcome. :-)
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