Linda Myers-Breslin

Over the last five years, computer-assisted composition instruction (CAI) has grown and changed considerably due to a shift toward network use. Initially, technology allowed pedagogies to focus on revision and editing. Then, pedagogical movement toward collaboration was furthered by local-areanetwork (LAN) discussion software like Daedalus Interchange and stand-alone hypertext programs such as Story-space and Hypercard. More currently, widearea-network (WAN) Internet technologies such as e-mail, MOOs and MUDS, Usenet news, inter-relay chat (IRC), and the World Wide Web allow for larger, more public collaborative ventures. When embarking upon such ventures, we need to recognize not just the important differences between the LAN-based and WAN-based discussions, but also the differences between contribution, conversation, community, and collaboration. This chapter describes a three-year study that explored the effects of technology on freshman student collaboration. The information reviews the motivation, methodology, and theoretical underpinnings of the study. The chapter then moves into a discussion of findings and their pedagogical implications, as well as areas for future research.

To those of us looking for new ways to invigorate our CAI pedagogy and to those new to computers-assisted writing instruction, the Internet appears as a big public writing space, a larger version of our LAN-based writing spaces. As we move students from private to public audiences, it makes sense to place students into the Net. There we can ask them to write in a space where anyone and everyone can read their words, and students can exchange ideas in a more real world setting, with people situated in the real-world. Through World Wide Web pages, newsgroup threads, chat rooms, MOOs and MUDS, students and nonacademics alike have a space in which to place their words. Naturally, as teachers implementing collaborative pedagogies, we would like students placed into an electronic space to mean that they form an instant writing community. We would like to assume that the interaction mimics that of the collaborative conversations we see in our classrooms and on our LANS. We hope that students read what others have to say and convey their own ideas, forming a community of writers who write carefully and critique thoughtfully. But is this what is really happening? I think not.

Students intermingling ideas in the same writing space does not necessarily equal students collaborating in that space. As technology permeates composition classrooms and collaborative pedagogies, students spend more time in shared writing spaces. This can be a good use of time. Unfortunately, this preliminary study shows that students spend more time avoiding work, hiding from teachers and groupmates, and planning social events than they do understanding each other and the task, sharing on-task ideas, and completing the assignment. Thus, as teachers using computer-assisted writing instruction, we must ask ourselves key questions: Is the collaborative use of electronic writing spaces helping our students write well as well as continually improving their composition skills or is the technology distracting students from writing well and hindering improvement of their composition skills? How can we best use technology to engage and teach our students writing, the subject at hand?

Networked writing does not constitute community, collaboration, or even conversation. Writing out thoughts and placing these ideas into a space (private or public) is brainstorming. Brainstorming helps create potential paper topics and development. Conversing is more than this. To converse, students must read what others write and respond directly, not just place ideas into a space. Conversation helps students further develop and clarify these ideas for a paper. Collaboration furthers conversation. To collaborate means more than reading what another person writes and placing one's own thoughts into the same space. Collaboration is a concerted pedagogical effort toward the creation of an end product. The terms community, collaboration, and conversation, when applied to the Internet, need more thorough consideration than most of us have given up to this point.

We must remember that the LAN-based software is created by programmers in conjunction with teachers. Thus, pedagogy is integrated into the structure of these writing environments. The intent of these programs is clear to the student as well as the teacher: collaboration toward creating an effective final document. The Internet is not created with any pedagogical emphasis. We might easily envision the Internet as a large LAN for academic writing with connections to students from other schools and countries. Or we can envision connections with nonacademic users, placing our students in more authentic, real-world rhetorical situations. Do these connections and the ensuing discourse benefit our students as we envision? Perhaps there is benefit; however, there are several aspects of our beneficial intent that must be considered. Three aspects are particularly problematic: (1) the teacher's concept of collaboration might be quite different from the students' concepts, (2) collaboration is not a natural by-product of conversation, and (3) collaboration requires deliberate and concerted pedagogical efforts.

STUDY MOTIVATION

Almost two decades ago, computers changed the face of composition. Computer-assisted composition instruction became an important subdiscipline within Composition and Rhetoric. Most articles proclaimed a miraculous increase in student interest and participation ( Hawisher, Selfe, Spitzer, etc.). I saw these wondrous examples in few of my classes. Thus, I began my own studies, examining how students use technology to collaborate on assigned tasks and papers. Do they use technology as we suggest, or do they use technology as they desire? Do students collaborate on ideas and writing or do they cooperate by writing separate sections and later combining the sections into a whole paper? With answers to these questions, I hoped to better devise a pedagogy that would increase student participation toward the assigned tasks. The primary study described here displays low student involvement in CAI tasks. The study results presented may help us examine practices that we should avoid and stop, and may show us practices that we should use and improve.

To increase student task involvement in CAI tasks, we must consider how students prioritize their behaviors. We must discover what their process is: not the process that we make for them, but the process they actually use when working together via technology. We must know the rationale behind the decisions they make and all that influences their attitudes toward their groupmates, the task assignments, and the work/products. Once we have this information, we can create informed pedagogical strategies that will affect student interaction. We can stop laying our templates on top of their existing interaction or assuming that they behave as instructed. Student collaboration is about students finding the niche that allows them to get what they want.

Because the student collaborative process is more complex than previous composition literature reveals, we need new strategies for studying this process. This preliminary study provides a model strategy. This model for analysis of student collaboration includes cross-disciplinary protocol analysis. Surveys and interviews over time reveal the complexities of student collaboration (and our false assumptions about this collaboration) that might allow us to create better informed collaborative assignments that increase student involvement and interaction.

STUDY METHODOLOGY

Informed by cross-disciplinary research, this study examines ways in which information technologies alter the social and organizational dimensions of student interaction. In order to explore the effect of electronic communication on small-group, collaborative interaction, ideas from communication studies, behavioral science, and social science are employed in this ongoing research project. In order to examine classes as a whole and case study small groups, data was gathered from a variety of sources.The students, all seventeen to nineteen years of age, were enrolled in firstyear writing courses. They were grouped randomly. Case study groups were selected at random. There were two class types taught each semester; one served as a study group and the other as a control group. The study group was given information regarding group dynamics. This included a basic outline of how groups function, the usual group life span and its phases, inherent conflicts and how best to deal with them, the usual group pitfalls, and ways to achieve optimum productivity within the group. The other class was the control group: students followed the same syllabus as described above, but they did not have information about group dynamics. The basic objective was to see if instruction in group dynamics would help groups function more efficiently. The case study group members agreed to meet with me and to be interviewed four times during the semester.The initial survey and the initial case study interview were created to determine the students' experience and comfort in three specific areas: writing, group work, and computer use. I met with case study students before they met with their groups in order to get an idea of "who they were" before finding out "who they were in their group." Surveys were given to all students after each paper was completed in order to determine each group's process and effectiveness.

Whole Classes

Case Study Small Groups

In order to begin to address student apathy, I decided to inform groups about group dynamics. My thoughts concerning the dynamics described were that if students knew ways to work together effectively, they could consolidate their efforts, collaborate and cooperate efficiently, and therefore achieve a better process and product with less effort and time than when working alone. They could focus on the task, use each other's thoughts, skills, and experiences, and proficiently complete the assignments.

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

The theoretical underpinnings of this study, of the pedagogy employed, and of most networked writing software (such as Daedalus and Connections) stem from Kenneth Bruffee's collaborative learning approach to composition pedagogy. Bruffee argues that knowledge is not an accumulation of facts gathered, memorized, and regurgitated over the years, nor is knowledge information passed directly from tutor to student; instead, knowledge is communally acquired experiences, discussed by many, and agreed upon en masse. In other words, knowledge is socially constructed through the consensus of those participating in a given community. The challenge that Bruffee's ideas pose to writing teachers is one of transition. We must help students transition from their extracurricular, real-world communities to their academic or professional communities. Bruffee suggests that the best way to accomplish this transition is by placing students into learning groups and asking them to work collaboratively, socially constructing their knowledge base.

Each of Bruffee's assignments contains a two-stage process. The first stage asks students to pull from their own experiences and knowledge groups; the second stage asks students to contribute this knowledge to their current knowledge community. For example, a teacher provides a piece of writing and asks students to analyze it through a feminist perspective. Students work together, analyzing and discussing the piece in order to decide if the author achieves his or her goal(s). Bruffee's first stage is to place students in small groups, allowing students to talk with each other in their own terms, free from the teacher's ears and judgments. This stage encourages students to express themselves and explore their ideas freely without fear of "sounding stupid" in front of the teacher.

In the second stage, once the groups have completed their analysis, the teacher asks the groups to report their analysis and opinions to the class. This stage asks students to elevate their language in order for all to understand. Through reports and discussions, the teacher helps the students reach consensus. The teacher may read, distribute, or describe some professional, published critiques written about the piece, and by doing so, help students compare their analysis to those of scholars. In the second stage, students often delight in the similarities and learn from the differences between their words and the words of the critics. They begin to see, hear, and sense their transition into the academic (in this case feminist) knowledge community. Because students are in academia, they most often desire entrance into the academic community. The above example allows them to attempt entrance as a group and then to validate themselves through comparison with those already in the academic community.

Classroom networking software (such as Daedalus), or MOOs and MUDs on the Internet, manifest Bruffee's notions of collaborative learning by providing virtual writing spaces in which students can converse by simultaneously contributing their ideas, reading others' ideas, and giving and receiving feedback. Within these spaces, the teacher can create discussion spaces and threads for student groups or for the class as a whole. Students can also group by threads that help students interested in the same idea find each other for further topic discussion. Students enter these spaces readily and willingly; however, collaboration will not occur unless the teacher arranges and presents clearly defined tasks. The goal of transition between extracurricular and academic/professional discourse can only be achieved when the teacher successfully helps the groups reconcile their responses with the decided scholarly discourse community. In other words, the technology does not cause collaborative learning; instead, collaborative learning results from successful application of the technology within a particular social setting, a classroom of college students struggling through their course curriculum. The setting and the curriculum pre-establishes boundaries for conversations and creates a transitional community of students who hold a shared interest in gaining membership into the knowledge community presented by their teacher. Thus, the challenges for the teacher are also pre-established.

STUDY FINDINGS

The Initial Challenge for Teachers Is to Form a Clear Pedagogy and to Focus Pedagogical Efforts

These actions are challenging because the administration as well as our human nature want us to use the technology with as many bells and whistles as we can cram into each lesson. This is a mistake. Teachers need to bring themselves and their students into the electronic environment slowly, always thinking about what will best enable students to succeed at the given task. Most imperative is the teacher's preplanned pedagogy. Teachers must be aware of their course goals and use technology to realize those goals. Far too often the technology drives our pedagogy. We must stop this trend. Our pedagogy must drive our technology. Only then can technology be used in productive (instead of merely intriguing) ways. It is all well and good for the technology to add motivation to students' learning, but what are students learning? On this last point/question we must be clear.

For those of us utilizing collaborative pedagogies, we must remember that placing or intermingling words in the same writing space does not mean that students are conversing, much less collaborating. Students most often believe that collaboration means that they share ideas, then separate and write their papers for submission. In other words, they have a conversation on a particular topic, then write on that topic, edit, and submit the paper. Perhaps they will be asked to read a classmate's paper and edit it, but we should have students more involved in one another's process throughout, not just initially or at the end. In order for students to be invested in the collaboration, they must be involved with one another's papers from invention, through development and revision, to editing and evaluation. We need to make our expectations clear to students. We cannot assume that they know what we mean when we say "collaboration." Even in our classrooms, group work is rarely collaborative. The students do the work and then compare answers; collaboration comes next, when (off-task) they discuss, plan, and organize the evening festivities. We need to channel this later energy into the work at hand. Networked technology is not enough to focus students and spur collaboration. Clear, focused pedagogical efforts are required.

Another Challenge Is the Fact that Creating and Maintaining a Structured Setting Conducive to Collaboration and Transition is Deceptively Difficult

Effective pedagogy requires more than constructing a networked learning environment, such as building a MOO, installing software, or locating an internet space. Regardless of where your class is located, instituting policies and procedures for the space is crucial to running a productive class on the Internet. For example, the teacher must set a task, including goals and evaluation criteria, and a time limit in which to complete the task. If these parameters are missing, students will chat about themselves and their activities, not getting to the task until the end of the class period, when they realize the activity is due. The teacher must also decide what activities are pedagogically valuable. For example, a teacher might interpret student interaction with nonstudent users as productive collaboration. This may be true, but again, the only way to keep communication valuable is to set goals and criteria, checks and balances. Otherwise, students may become fluent in the discourse of a particular chat room, but this discourse might not be the discourse of the academic knowledge community. Thus, the students learn to chat in a particular way, but such chat does not give them access into the desired academic/professional knowledge community intended for the course.

The instructor must locate or create nonstudent users who will help students transition into the desired knowledge community, not resist the discourse of that community. Such transition can be achieved by contacting outside users and establishing an agreement with them, or by limiting the users of the group. Establishing agreement can take time, but it is not difficult. For example, if students are writing a travel journal, they might want firsthand information. The teachers should locate some travel chat rooms, go in, and ask if users are willing to converse with students (in an appropriate manner). If some or most agree, then that is a productive place to send students. Or the teacher may create a MOO room for the course and invite outside users, who agree to use the desired discourse, into this space. Both arrangements lead to another challenge: maintaining focus on the collaborative goal.

A MOO space is a superb environment for individual users to explore and express themselves and to read what others have to say; however, unless the task is an integral part of the MOO environment, such discovery activity is inherently thwarted. Students wish to talk, but usually about topics they create. The teacher must define and explain collaboration, clarify the assignment, and set a time limit. Because actions within the MOO such as movement, posting, whispering, paging, and so on, can distract rather than help accomplish the task, the teacher may choose not to explain these functions.

Because Play-Tasks Are as Important as Project-Tasks, Teachers Must Create and Assign Both Task Types

To avoid difficulties with collaboration, trust is essential. In order to build trust, there is a need for two task types when combining students into a collaborative venture: (1) community-building tasks and (2) project-building tasks. Community-building adds the element of play, of getting to know each other in an informal sense, to the act of collaboration. A sense of community and trust won't develop through project-tasks. This sense builds with what goes on around the project-tasks. Play is the best way to allow students to get to know each other and to develop a level of trust vital to accomplishing a group goal.

We can bring students into the unfamiliar academic arena with some playful, not-so-academic exercises like the following:

At the Beginning of the Course, Limited and Fully-Detailed Assignments Are Most Effective

We must remember that students are not always used to working in a virtual environment. Thus, just as we need to define our terms, we also need to define our assignments. When we place students into small groups within the classroom, they often know what we expect. This understanding does not transfer into the Internet. Therefore, for the first two or three weeks of the semesters, the more detailed we are and the more swapping of information we do, the better. This practice will come to be the norm for students and they will know what to do, but this understanding is not a given at the start of the course. For example, students working on a travel journal might receive the following assignments to get them started:

Write five assumptions you hold about your group's country of choice. Saving a copy for yourself, send these assumptions to your groupmates. Select the assumptions that overlap with yours, elaborate on why you held that assumption. Saving a copy for yourself, send your elaboration to your groupmates. Look at the list you have received. After each elaboration, write any evidence you have that supports the assumption. Saving a copy for yourself, send this information to your groupmates. Now you are ready to create a draft. Select the assumptions for which you have evidence or decide from where you might gather evidence. Revise your groupmates' information, reconciling it with your own. Decide if your thesis will claim that the stereotypes about the country are true or false. Form this information into a draft. Saving a copy for yourself, send this draft to your groupmates. Discuss and decide which claim your group will take, and revise the draft that the group like best. Then decide who will do what in order to gather supporting information.

Basic Instruction About Group Dynamics is Helpful Toward ProjectBuilding Tasks

Members of the informed groups' avoided pitfalls such as groupthink (in which students grab onto the first idea mentioned and run with it, although it might not be worthwhile or the most appropriate choice). These students left themselves open to a range of ideas, voiced dissenting opinions, and made sure that all members were heard in order to arrive at a well-considered topic. Out of urgency for consensus, the uninformed groups seemed to accept the first topic mentioned or the topic stressed most adamantly by a member. This urgency caused them to select topics that were not as challenging and interesting as the informed groups' selections.

Initially, the group dynamics instruction was problematic for the informed groups. Instead of seeing the group as a means to an end product, the informed group saw the group as a task in itself. Each group member was too focused on his or her role in the group. For example, a basic of group dynamics is group member roles. Four has been the number of member found to work most effectively within a group. There are four roles they can take to aid group effectiveness: leader--keeps the group focused and moving toward goal; recorder--notes discussion ideas and conclusions; encourager--provides ideas to keep discussion going; and reporter--reports group findings to the whole class or organization.

Preoccupation with roles hindered some "recorders" from contributing ideas because they were so concerned with getting down everything said that they could not think of ideas. Similarly, group "reporters" were so concerned with how to report the information that they did not contribute much. The "encouragers" felt that they did not have to give ideas but had to get others to talk, and the "leaders" were stressed that the others were not contributing and the group was not progressing with the assignment. Once the problem was realized and addressed by the teacher, the roles were helpful. The teacher must make it clear to the group that all students must contribute; then all can help the recorder note the highlights of the group interaction, and help the reporter plan what he or she is to say.

By contrast the uninformed groups were not informed about group roles, and therefore they were not overly concerned about their performance within the group. These groups used the group as a means to an end--a well written paper. However, these groups also had more complaints regarding group members who did not "pull their weight." Thus, a bit of instruction regarding the basics of small group dynamics and about the major pitfalls that groups encounter proved quite helpful. Teachers must be wary, however, that they do not overly emphasize these issues to the point that students feel their grade depends on how well they perform within their group. This point relates to the first challenge regarding a focused pedagogy: we might ask, are we evaluating the students' writing or their group work?

Teaching Students Only the Basics of the Available Technology and Encouraging Them to Use It At Will is More Effective than Assigning Use and Explaining Every Step

Again, less information worked best for students. Both sections were taught how to use the available technologies: the MOO, conference board, e-mail, and nickname file. Members of the informed groups received information regarding which technologies could prove helpful at various stages of the writing process. It was suggested, for example, that the MOO could support brainstorming, the conference boards could support peer review, and e-mail could support revision and editing. Unfortunately, as with group roles, the informed students felt that they had to use the technologies as suggested. This seemed to stifle rather than enhance students process. This difficulty had to be realized and rectified.

Members of the uninformed groups, on the other hand, who had no suggestion regarding when to incorporate specific technologies, immediately began to decide which technologies to use and when. Most of these students used the technologies as described above. But the fact that they created their own group system of operations removed the stifled feeling and allowed students to focus on their writing rather then the technology.

All Spaces Need Auxiliary Features to Support Student Collaborative Work

Teachers should include the following features in their learning spaces: a particular place for the teacher's assignment, separate sessions for the various student interactions and assigned tasks, an accessible database of class documents including student papers, and an archive of previous discussions with easy retrieval for student research. Such ancillaries help the teacher situate the assignment within the larger classroom context, thereby fostering the transitional discourse and desired knowledge community.

The World Wide Web is another area that needs auxiliary features in order to help students collaborate. Although websites provide much information for students to explore, the opportunity to consider the information in a collaborative way does not readily exist. While users can easily surf through the Web's many hypertextual threads, users cannot synchronously interact with others seeking the information. Browsing and research on the Web does not help students make discursive connections with a new knowledge community. If the Web is going to support student collaboration, it will need sharable virtual spaces that allow students to navigate the Web together and converse about what they see. Only through such spaces can students collaboratively research information via the World Wide Web.

Course Information Should be Made Available in Electronic and Paper Copy

Placing all course expectations, assignments, and assignment expectations on the computer is a good idea, especially if this information is placed on the Web, which is always available. Placing course and assignment information onto the Internet eliminates excuses such as "I forgot we had to read that," "I did not know that was due today," and "It had to be five pages?" With the information constantly available, the students have no reason to claim that they did not know, or could not find their assignment sheet.

Equally important, however, is providing this information to students in hard copy. Many teachers have begun to utilize the concept of a "paperless classroom," which means that assignments are given and received on computer without the use of paper. This technique causes many difficulties, especially for those of us new to the computer classroom or particular technologies. Should the server go down, the teacher's Web page not save, or some other catastrophe occur, at least the students have the information. Should a student not have access to the technology at home or dorm or elsewhere outside of the classroom, he or she still has the information in order to complete the assignment. Plus, students can easily make personal notes as the teacher verbally explains the assignment, if they have the assignment in front of them.

Finally, dual notation of the course policies, procedures, and assignments is just a good idea. All students can locate the information and none can claim that the information was unavailable.

Short, Three-Week, Five-to-Ten Page Writing Projects Help the Writing Groups Establish a Group Process and Effective Strategies for Technology Use

Initially, the course change suggested most often by students was to reduce the number of papers. Students find it difficult to complete a group paper in the time usually allotted to complete a single authored paper. Although theoretically it seems that with technology and a group, students should be able to complete a paper, group or single authored, within two weeks, but this is often not the case. When the number of papers is reduced to four for the semester and when the students are given three weeks to complete a paper, not only are the teachers happier with the grades, but so are the students. Most students comment that they have time to complete what they consider the full writing process. They also stop using the excuse that they "do not have long enough to write a good paper." Once the time is extended, students have to claim responsibility for the product. Thus, students are not "getting away with something" because, with the extended time, the teacher can expect a bit more in quality.

An Emphasis on Technology Throughout the School Has an Effect on Groupware Use

Once the freshmen students realize the extent of technology use at our university, they are more eager to learn the technology, particularly the MOO and e-mail systems. Through our school's e-mail system, students have access not only to each other and students at other schools, but to course listings and all that the World Wide Web has to offer: postings of social events, bulletin boards for selling and buying, or boards dedicated to Star Trek, soap operas, parasailing, religious affiliations, Chaucer literature, psychology, and computer groups. Most any interests that students might have is listed, and students can join a conversation with others who have the same interests.

Most groupware, such as Daedalus Interchange and MOO programming, allows students to locate discussion threads. Threads are contributions that discuss (or mention) a particular topic. Students follow the thread, see who is contributing, contact these people, and begin an in-depth discussion of the topic. In a MOO, students can tell the contributors to meet in a specific room in order to isolate and focus discussion. Or students can form their own conference topic on a conference board and contribute asynchronously.

Teachers should emphasize the prevalence of technology throughout their schools in all disciplines. Use of technology in other disciplines is a valuable discussion to have near the beginning of the course. Discussion regarding group work and collaboration in other disciplines and in the work-world is also quite helpful toward motivating student interaction.

Teachers Cannot Assume That Students Will Use the Technology as Suggested, or Even as Assigned  

One of the challenges of CAI is the assumption that students will use the technology the way that the teacher suggests. For example, the teacher usually introduces ways in which various communication technologies can be used at each point in the writing process: MOO or Interchange for brainstorming, e-mail and conference boards for exchanging drafts, peer reviewing, and revising, and the conference boards for peer editing sessions. Students most often do not use these technologies as described. For students, Interchange does not always encourage brainstorming opportunity. Instead Interchange and MOOs allow opportunity for getting to know each other, a safe forum in which to tease, joke, and play. When surveyed, a few students referred to the synchronous conferencing system as "a toy."

Similarly, instructions regarding e-mail might provide a way for students to plan group meetings, share writing, and exchange criticism. For students, however, it can provide a subversive way of avoiding work for the assigned project. A few case-study students, for example, did not check their e-mail, even after repeated reminders from the teachers in classes and from their group members out of classes. Thus, these "avoiders" forced other group members into using low-level communication technologies (the phone), and when the avoiders did not respond to calls, the group had to move on without them. These avoiders used the technology to hide from work.

Another assumption held by educators in computer-assisted instruction is that students will be so mesmerized and seduced by the technology that all of them will want to use it. We do not consider that some students might simply choose not to use the technology for whatever reason. For some, it is simply unfamiliar. For others, personal interaction is easier and more rewarding. This case is exemplified by students' complaints that they preferred to talk in person, rather than over the Internet, (which they described as a "toy"), when in the same room. Students resented the technology and found it frustrating when all those conversing were in the same room. Students must be allowed time to speak orally. Yes, we are teaching students to write, but many of them also like to talk.

Students process information in very different ways; some need to verbalize their ideas, to hear them aloud. Students seem most content when there is time allotted for both writing and for speaking in class. We should ask them to write for a while and then MOO, or the other way around. We just have to be sure that we have different topics for the verbal and written discussions, unless the students MOO as a small group and then verbally report back to the class.

Students Need Technology Modeled for Them in Order to Realize Teacher Expectations

Students model their technology use after the teachers technology use. Thus, the we should demonstrate the types of communication we desire over the MOO and over the conference boards. Initially in the study, for example, I placed assignments on the MOO and the conference boards, and I sent e-mail messages when I forgot to tell students something in classes. Unfortunately, students closely followed my model. They tried technological short cuts or avoided the technology. Because I never engaged in discussion with the students on the computer, neither did most of the students. I found that students were just sending each other short, instructional e-mail messages, such as "Let's meet in the library at the big table at 8 tonight," or "Call him again." They did not post papers for review or send messages discussing the paper or ideas for it. They missed out on an efficient and productive way to convey their ideas. In later classes, when I engaged students in the types of electronic discourse that I wanted them to pursue, they did so. Thus, we cannot assume that telling students to communicate on the computer means they will do so without any example or participation from us.

The Grade Is the Ultimate Student Motivation

Student motivation is an area also under examination in this study. Are students prompted to use technology or to participate in the group due to personalities (theirs and others'), by popularity, by technological expertise, by adeptness of writing skills? In light of the findings, instructors must consider the following questions: What then can we do to effectively encourage student participation? And does motivation simply result from the paper grade or course grade? Apparently the answer to the second question is more important to a significant number of students. This study indicates that "the grade," in fact, is the primary motivator for subjects' performance.

By the third project/paper, students (whether working together or individually) forgot about the group and focused on achieving a high grade. Students cared that the product was acceptable to the teacher; they showed limited concern for their group members' opinions.

The Collaborative Writing Experience is Valuable for Students

Should I teach a classes using the collaborative techniques again? If not, why not? If so, why so?

Of the 242 students, only eighteen stated that they did not benefit from the group writing experience. I was surprised and pleased that the students appreciated being forced to write in a group and felt they had benefited from the experience. Of course, I wanted them to have gained awareness of their writing style and confidence in expressing themselves through writing. A few students mentioned ideas corresponding with my wishes; most, however, noted learning about personal process.

QUESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Software Learning

Although most groups in this study used the available technologies, some did not; thus, leaving many questions unanswered by the work reported here. Of the groups that opted to use electronic communication as suggested, how did they learn the technology? How do students best learn software packages? In our classes, the technology was taught; then its implementation left up to the students. Would students learn better and be more motivated to use the technology if it were peer taught by tutors, by fellow group members, or by reading printed or on-line documentation? Is the simple trial-and-error method the best teacher? Is a combination of these methods most effective? Is the combination different for different groups--suiting the learning style of the group members? Can we discover a group learning style? Can we motivate hesitant students to learn and use technology? If so, how?

Voice

If a collaborative writing group uses electronic communication, how does their computer voice differ from their verbal voice? Does their personal etiquette differ from their electronic etiquette? If not specifically asked to create rules, does the group create rules? Are rules necessary? If a group is required to create rules, what types of rules are created?

Gender

Gender bias was intentionally omitted as part of this study. Many studies show that gender clearly influences interpersonal collaboration. Does it cause similar effects in electronic communication? What about in a mixture of electronic and personal communication? Do same-gender groups or mixedgender groups work best together, develop the better process? Which group type creates the better product?

Task Type

Consider the task type and technology and collaborative uses. How does technology use differ between collaborative and cooperative writing tasks? Are all types of technology employed? At what stages, if any, in the writing process are students more apt to turn to each other for face-to-face meetings? How satisfied are students with multiauthored rather than single-authored texts?

CONCLUSION