THE VTIE COLLABORATIVE WRITING ENVIRONMENT

B. Busschots, L. Raeside and J. G. Keating

Department of Computer Science

National University of Ireland, Maynooth

S. Waddington

Department of Geography

National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Keywords:

Collaboration, Collaborative Writing, Learning Environment.

Abstract:

This paper discusses the design of the VTIE Collaborative Writing Environment (CWE) and the functionality

of the various components that make up this environment. The advantages of supporting collaborative writing

are also discussed as well as different organizational schemes that can be used when structuring collaborative

writing exercises. The paper also contains technical details on the implementation of the VTIE CWE.

1 INTRODUCTION

As broadband internet access becomes more wide-

spread in schools more and more resources become

available to teachers and students. Some great exam-

ples of such resources are the Telescopes in Education

Project (telescopesineducation.com, 2005), Faulkes

Telescope Project (faulkes-telescope.com, 2005) and

Bug Scope (Thakkar et al., 2000). These projects al-

low students to do real science from their classroom

with state of the art equipment, this was simply not

possible in the past. The VTIE Portal was initially de-

signed to provide teachers and students with the tools

they need to get the most out of internet-based tele-

scopes. As such some of the tools developed as part

of the VTIE project are speciﬁcally targeted at As-

tronomy, however, other tools are much more general

and are perfectly at home away from telescopes and

astronomy. The VTIE CWE (Collaborative Writing

Environment) described in this paper is one of these

general tools.

A central aim of the VTIE project was to provide

all the tools developed to schools in such a way as to

make the tools as easy as possible to integrate into the

school environment. It was considered important that

schools not have to spend any money on software in

order to be able to use the VTIE tools. This means that

the VTIE tools themselves should be free but also that

the tools cannot depend on any other software that is

not free. The VTIE tools should also not be tied to any

particular operating system so that all schools can par-

ticipate. Finally, as schools do not tend to have dedi-

cated computer technicians the VTIE tools should not

require complicated installation in the schools. By

creating all the VTIE tools in a web environment all

these aims can be easily met. Hence, the entire VTIE

portal is web-based and all schools need to take part is

an internet connection and the FireFox web browser

(getﬁrefox.com, 2005) which is available on all major

platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux and many Unixes).

The current VTIE CWE is the direct result of a

rapid prototyping model including formative evalua-

tions with students over a three-year period and a year

of consultation with teachers from local primary and

secondary level schools. Our initial prototype did not

support collaborative writing but all our evaluations

showed a need for the software to properly support

group working and collaboration.

2 COLLABORATION

Collaboration is a very broad term, Erkens, et al. give

the following deﬁnition; “A collaborative learning

situation may be deﬁned as one in which two or more

students work together to fulﬁl an assigned task within

a particular domain of learning in order to achieve

a joint goal” (Erkens et al., 2005). Given this def-

inition, it is possible that a wide variety of learning

tasks can be envisaged as involving a degree of col-

laboration, ranging from those which are extremely

practical, such as cultivating a garden and carrying

out scientiﬁc experiments, to the group writing of a

221

Busschots B., Raeside L., G. Keating J. and Waddington S. (2006).

THE VTIE COLLABORATIVE WRITING ENVIRONMENT.

In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and

e-Government / e-Learning, pages 221-228

DOI: 10.5220/0001254302210228

 SciTePress

novel. The focus of the VTIE CWE is on the devel-

opment and usage of collaboration both within the re-

search process (in the form of the sharing of informa-

tion gained) and in the production of a written report

on the work.

Collaborative working can be seen as having a vi-

tal role in the development of students for their fu-

ture lives as part of the knowledge society as “Knowl-

edge work is characterised by systematic knowledge

advancement, sharing of expertise, and collaborative

elaboration of knowledge products” (Lakkala et al.,

2005, p. 338). It has also been suggested that collab-

orative learning experiences can:

• Improve motivation some students ﬁnd working

with others encourages them to complete a task.

This has been found to apply more to male students

than females, for example a study by Hidi et al re-

vealed that after receiving the same instructional

programme, improvement in performance was im-

proved more for male students than for female ones

if the subsequent task involved collaboration with

others (Hidi et al., 2002).

• Facilitate the construction of knowledge and the

development of understanding, as the instant feed-

back from others encourages students to explore

their current knowledge and exposes ﬂaws or limi-

tations and to review their ideas.

• Encourage the development of metacognition and

reﬂection in thinking.

• Facilitate student-centred learning.

It is because of these wide ranging justiﬁcations

for the use of collaboration in learning that Collab-

orative Learning Environments (CLEs) using ICT, in-

cluding the present project, have been developed. The

main areas of collaboration involve the sharing of

resources/information between small groups of stu-

dents and the production of a combined report on the

project.

Writing is one area where “co-operative work may

be problematic as it was originally designed for in-

dividual learning” (Klein et al., 1994). However, it

has also been suggested that it is an area where col-

laboration is likely to improve the end product for

many students and so various strategies have been ex-

plored to facilitate it. While there are, doubtless, a

very wide range of possibilities for this, including e-

mail exchanges and Wikipedia-type approaches, the

present project, focussing on younger children was

considered to require a more structured and less wide-

ranging approach to collaboration, so that the students

would feel more comfortable in participating.

It was decided that for each section of the report

a draft should be produced which would then be re-

vised based on comments from the other students in

working on the report and rewritten to produce the

ﬁnal report. Zammuner identiﬁed three basic orga-

nizational approaches, some relating to pairs of col-

laborators, while others involved larger groups (Zam-

muner, 1995). Three basic variations were identiﬁed,

as shown in Table 1:

Table 1: Organisational Approaches to Collaboration.

Initial Draft Revision Final Version

Group/pair A Group/pair B Group/pair A

Group/pair A Group/pair A Group/pair A

Individual Group/Pair Individual *

The scheme adopted in our project is equivalent to

the third organizational approach in Table 1. While

there are arguments in favor of the adoption of all of

the above strategies, Zammuner contrasted success in

producing written work by students working individ-

ually, with those working in collaboration patterns 2

and 3, reporting that “The most signiﬁcant changes

(usually improvements) in the quality of revision op-

erations occurred when the revision was carried out

cooperatively rather than individually” (Zammuner,

1995, p. 122). He suggests that this was because the

‘outsider’ would provide immediate feedback, similar

to that provided by another person in a conversation,

unlike in the usual, solitary process of writing. As

noted by Erkens, et al. (Erkens et al., 2005, p. 3),

“Collaborative writers need to test their hypotheses,

justify their propositions and clarify their goals. This

may lead to increased awareness of and more con-

scious control over the writing and learning process”.

It was, therefore, decided that this method of individ-

ual writing, followed by feed back from the rest of the

group feeding back into revisions of the text would be

adopted for the VTIE Collaborative Writing Environ-

ment.

Working successfully with CLEs can be extremely

demanding on both students and teachers, particularly

in relation to the need for students to develop the so-

cial skills and thinking skills necessary for collabo-

ration simultaneously with the technical/ ICT skills.

Many teachers express concerns that their role may

become that of ‘technician’ if the CLE is technically

demanding and the teacher is critical in determining

the success or failure of the collaboration, as his/her

role must be in “organising the community’s activi-

ties and establishing the underlying conditions of the

learning environment, and building up appropriate

infrastructures for collective effort” (Lakkala et al.,

2005, p. 338 - 339). This makes it essential that

the environment produced be as simple to setup and

use as possible and that the environment provide suf-

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ﬁcient support and resources for the teacher and stu-

dents. Ideally the technology would become trans-

parent to the users and they would be free to concen-

trate entirely on the task at hand. This was one of the

driving factors towards adopting a web based inter-

face as this removed the need for complex software

installation and allows users to transfer their existing

knowledge and experience of using the internet to our

environment.

3 THE VTIE COLLABORATIVE

WRITING ENVIRONMENT

The VTIE CWE provides an interfaces to support

both teachers and students throughout the writing

process from project design right through to publica-

tion of the students’ work. Our CWE can be consid-

ered to consist of three components:

1. The Project Design and management Interfaces

2. The VTIE ScrapBook

3. The Writing Interfaces

Our CWE is built around a model which has de-

veloped throughout our formative evaluations and our

discussions with teachers and is in agreement with the

research discussed in Section 2. Although our tools

were designed around this process it should be noted

that the environment does not force teachers or stu-

dents to stick rigidly to this process, this makes the

environment more ﬂexible. The process starts with

the teacher designing the structure of the projects that

the students will complete. We envisage this design

phase being completed in class with the teacher show-

ing the students the evolving structure with a data pro-

jector and the students having an input into the design.

The design of the project is represented in a graphical

way and as as it is manipulated the visual representa-

tion changes. This same visual representation of the

project is used throughout the rest of the process both

in the teacher and student views. Once the structure

is deﬁned it is referred to as a Project Template and

can be saved for re-use in the future. From this tem-

plate the mentor can then create project instances and

assign students to these instances. The teacher breaks

the group/class into teams and assigns one team to

each project instance. Within each project instance

each section is assigned to a single student who then

writes that section. The rest of the students in the team

and the teacher can see the current state of each sec-

tion and a messaging system is provided to allow them

to provide advice and help as the student works from

an initial draft towards a ﬁnal version. This is con-

sistent with Zammuner’s third model shown in Table

1. It is envisaged that the students will use the inter-

net to gather information for their project. The VTIE

ScrapBook was developed to provide the students and

the teacher with a means of gathering and sharing in-

formation and images they ﬁnd on the web. Finally,

when the teacher is happy with the project instance

it is published to a digital library in both HTML and

PDF format. This allows future students to use the

work of past students as part of their research on a

topic.

3.1 Project Design Interfaces

The project design interfaces allow the teacher to

manage and control their projects and project tem-

plates and manage their students. They can create

classes/groups, edit classes/groups, create templates,

edit templates, create projects, view the progress of

their students’ work.

In order to protect the anonymity of students on the

system we store no information about students at all,

not even their names. All Students are referred to as

‘Student 1’, ‘Student 2’ etc within each class/group.

The teacher can print off a table on which the stu-

dents’ real names can be written.

Projects are created with a direct manipulation in-

terface. As the teacher clicks to add and edit sec-

tions a graphic representation of the template up-

dates in real time to show the current design of the

project template. A screenshot of a template being

generated in this way is shown in Figure 1. Project

Templates consist of global thoughts/notes and sec-

tions. Each section has a title, optional initial con-

tent and thoughts/notes for that section. When creat-

ing a project form a template the teacher is presented

with a 4 step wizard. In the ﬁrst step the mentor is

asked to name the project, pick the class/group that

will do the project and pick the amount of teams the

class/group will be split into. The second step al-

lows the teacher to name each team. By default the

teams are named ‘Team 1’, ‘Team 2’ etc but it is

envisaged that the teams could decide on their own

names as a ﬁrst group/team building activity. The

third step allows the teacher to specify which stu-

dents go into which team. Finally, the fourth step

presents the teacher with a graphical representation

of the template chosen but with extra features to allow

the teacher to assign students to the different sections.

At this point the teacher can edit the design of the

project by adding sections, removing sections, edit-

ing sections and thoughts and editing the title. When

the teacher is happy with the design and student al-

locations they can then click a button to generate the

project instances, one for each team.

3.2 VTIE ScrapBook

The VTIE ScrapBook provides students and teachers

with a personal portfolio. It has been implemented as

THE VTIE COLLABORATIVE WRITING ENVIRONMENT

223

Figure 1: A screen shot of a template being generated.

a FireFox browser extension so that it is always avail-

able to the students and teachers while they are brows-

ing the web as shown in Figure 2. At any stage they

can drag and drop text, links or images onto a drop-

zone to add them to their ScrapBook. The students

and teachers can also create notes as they go and save

those into their ScrapBook. Teachers can then make

any of the information in their scrap-book available to

students in one of their projects and students can share

any of their information with the other students in one

of the teams they belong to. All information stored in

the VTIE ScrapBook is actually stored on the VTIE

server rather than on the machine being used by the

student/teacher at the time so as students move from

one machine to another their portfolio will always be

available to them.

The teacher can also see the contents of of all their

students’ portfolios and can delete any scraps they

deem inappropriate for any reason. Each scrap also

stores the URL from which it was saved so the teacher

can see where the students got their information from.

The VTIE ScrapBook also interfaces directly with

the Writing interface via JavaScript. This make it as

easy as possible for students to incorporate the re-

sources they ﬁnd on the internet into their reports.

3.3 Writing Interfaces

When students or teachers view a project they are

ﬁrst presented with the graphical representation of the

project. They can then view the content of any section

by clicking on it which takes them to the writing view.

In this view all the sections of the paper appear as tabs

across the top and the contents of the current section

appears in the main area of the page below the tabs.

When a student enters the writing view they can

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Figure 2: A screen shot of the VTIE ScrapBook in use. The ScrapBook is the sidebar on the left and is always there when

surﬁng the web.

see the content of all the sections in the project but

can only edit the sections they are assigned to. When

editing a section the students are presented with a

WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor

that allows them to generate their content. Our eval-

uations showed very clearly that it is important not to

provide the students with more formatting tools than

they need, hence the WYSIWYG editor only provides

them with the tools they really need. They can make

text bold and italic and the can create bulleted and

numbered lists and that is all the formatting they can

do. In the writing view the students can also see all

comments made by the other students in their team

and their teacher on the current section. They can also

add a new comment. Figure 3 shows a screenshot of

a student using the writing interface.

Like a student a teacher can see the contents of all

sections in their projects. The teacher can also see all

the comments that have been made and can add addi-

tional comments to each section to help the student.

The writing view also provides access to a simple

version control system for each section. There are

always two backup version of each section, one the

student controls and one the teacher controls. Both

the teacher and the student can see both backup ver-

sions. The student’s backup version is automatically

updated each time the section is saved, then teacher’s

backup must be manually updated by the teacher. The

student can choose to revert to their backup version at

any time. The teacher’s backup version should be up-

dated by the teacher only when the teacher feels there

has been progress. This mechanism ensures that if a

student accidently makes a major mistake and looses

good work in both the current and backup versions the

teacher can still restore the section to the way it was

the last time the teacher took a backup.

4 IMPLEMENTATION

When the decision was made to implement our soft-

ware as a web application a number of decisions were

also taken on standards to develop to. Our web in-

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Figure 3: A screen shot of the the Writing Interface in use by a student showing the WYSIWYG interface.

terfaces are all developed to comply with the follow-

ing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards;

XHTML1.0 and CSS2.1. In order to prevent the

need for so called CSS hacks to deal with the miss-

implementation of the Box Model by browsers like

MicroSoft’s Internet Explorer, the decision was also

taken to target the FireFox brower. As well as re-

moving the need for messy CSS hacks this also has

the added bonus that it allows us to implement some

of our client-sode code as FireFox Browser Exten-

sions like the VTIE ScrapBook. For the schools Fire-

Fox also has the added bonus that it is more secure

and so less likely to bring viruses and trojans into

the school’s network. This is especially important as

many trojans today manifest themselves by displaying

pop-up windows containing explicit advertisements

for pornography.

The basic architecture of the VTIE CWE is shown

in Figure 4. As you can see from this ﬁgure the code is

distributed over the client and server side and utilizes

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Figure 4: The basic architecture of the VTIE CWE.

many technologies.

The project management interfaces within the col-

laborative Writing Environment make extensive use

of object-oriented JavaScript and DHTML. These in-

terfaces communicate with the server via AJAX and

make use XML to transfer the complex data involved

between the client and the server.

On the server-side the decision was made to de-

velop the code in Java. This decision was partly mo-

tivated by the number of Java packages available to

help with the code and partly motivated by the skill-

set of the VTIE team. The server-side code is imple-

mented using Apache’s Java Struts framework and is

deployed with the Apache Tomcat Web Server.

As XML is used extensively within the VTIE sys-

tem to store and transfer complex data types such as

project templates and instances the initial prototypes

of the VTIE Writing Environment used Apache’s

Xindice native XML database to store data but this

technology is still very much underdevelopment and

was found not to be up to the task yet. Instead the

PostgreSQL relational database is used to store the

data. Much of the data is still stored as XML but

within a relational structure with meta-data stored

separately to speed up searching of the database.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Based on Erkens’ deﬁnition of Collaboration dis-

cussed in Section 2 the VTIE Collaborative Writing

Environment supports collaboration in two ways. Our

system supports collaborative writing by adopting a

model in which a student creates an initial draft, all

members of their sections all members of their team

then comment on this draft and these comments feed

into a cycle of revision resulting in the end product.

According to the work of Zammuner this is one of

the better approaches to collaborative writing. As

THE VTIE COLLABORATIVE WRITING ENVIRONMENT

227

well as supporting collaboration while writing the

VTIE ScrapBook also supports collaboration while

researching the topic the students will be reporting

on by allowing them to easily share the relevant re-

sources they ﬁnd on the internet.

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