Pair Writing with Google Docs
One of the key strengths (so it is said) of the OU course production process is the course team approach (Google turns this up as a good hit for that topic: Designing Multi-Media Courses for Individualized Study: The Open University Model and its Relevance to Conventional Universities. - check the date.. 1975?!).
Whilst production timescales can run into years for large, 60 credit point course, production of our online 10 point short courses (equating to approx. 100 hours of study, including assessment and online conferencing) is of the order 6 to 9 months, all told.
One of the things we are experimenting with on a new short course is the use of Google docs for document creation. Yesterday, two of use were editing the same document - the first week's content - at the same time, albeit different sections.
I haven't had a chance to chat to Karen, the colleague I was working with (hopefully, rather than against...) about this, but a couple of things struck me as I walked the dog last night:
- a typical authoring process in the course team approach is for an academic to produce a working draft of a substantial piece of course material, and circulate it for comment from course team members; the comments are then taken on board and another draft produced, again for comment, before a final version is produced. An external assessor also comments on the final draft. In a paired/collaborative authoring environment, changes can be observed at a fine level, and opportunities for discussing the shape of the document arise in the form of an ongoing conversation. In this way, the document can evolve as if it were a conversation.
- Karen and both work frequently from home. Paired, collaborative authoring displays the presence of the other person editing the same document, which provides a feeling of social presence that can be lacking for homeworkers; (compare this with working in an open plan office, which I don't think I'd like to do...)
- authoring a large piece of course material can be a significant undertaking, and potentially risky, if, for example, a draft is not well-liked by the commenting course team. Working to a deadline that may be months hence means slippage often occurs - if I have 6 months to author something, I don't need to start now... In contrast, the shared/collaborative document space provides an opportunity for working directly with someone via a written conversation, over a reasonably short timescale;
- note that I'm not talking about writing a classic, Socratic dialogue, but evolving a living document through conversation; as an organisation developing distance materials, we developed a tutorial in print model, that has itself evolved over time as new "CMC" technologies have become available, allowing us to support interaction with - and between - students in new ways. I don't know if the draft material we are producing at the moment will benefit from the ongoing conversation myself and Karen will be having during its production, but it's an experiment that I think is worth trying.
- cf. pair programming: Pair programming requires two programmers to participate in a combined development effort at one workstation.; and also Initial Experiences with Pair-Writing (which was done over the shoulder with a single keyboard). This reminds me that several problematic sections of a previous course I worked on were written in an over-the-shoulder pair writing sort of way; pair writing in Google docs is maybe not so immediate - we're not arguing over every word at the time it is written (although we could... either in the document directly, or by using comments or IM to talk through a difficult sentence, for example) - but there is the opportunity to both solicit and provide timely feedback at any level of granularity (section, subsection, paragraph, sentence, word even).
Of course, Karen may not agree... (maybe we should have written this post conversationally...!)
PS also see this post about collaborative production of a Google presentation...
Posted by ajh59 at September 21, 2007 03:31 PM