The present study investigates the effect of e-mail on Iranian learners of English and focuses on teaching thewriting skillvia e-mail. More specifically, the study investigates (a) whether using e-mail has any statistically significant effect on improving high school students' writing skill, and (b) whether the proficiency level has any relation with students’ writing improvement through using ...

One critical issue arising in the educational use of collaborative learning concerns the teacher’s difficulty in evaluating the contribution and participation of each student in group-work. This article aims to illustrate and discuss a methodology that enables evaluation of the collaborative learning process based on co-writing in a wiki environment.After considering the effectiveness of co-wri...

OBJECTIVE To explore concrete approaches to socio-technical design of collaborative healthcare information systems and to design a groupware technology for collaborative clinical trial protocol writing. METHOD We conducted "quick and dirty ethnography" through semi-structured interviews, observational studies, and work artifacts analysis to understand the group work for protocol development. ...

The problem of PhD attrition, especially at the dissertation-writing stage, is not solely related to mentoring, departments, or disciplines; it is a problem that affects the entire institution. As such, solutions require collaborative efforts for student success. Building on Yeatman's master-apprentice model, which assumes mastering disciplinary writing in singular advisor-student contexts, and...

This paper describes a collaborative experiment with a special software application supporting the acquisition of initial reading and writing skills embedded in a computer-integrated environment for young children. The NIMIS project has set up three Computer-integrated Classrooms across Europe with appropriate “roomware” environments, i.e. furniture, hardware and software to support early learn...

Wikis have been recently promoted as tools that foster collaborative learning. However, there has been little research devoted to the criteria that are suitable to address issues pertinent to collaborative learning. This paper proposes a set of criteria to explore technical and pedagogical usability issues of collaborative learning with wikis. The criteria are then used to evaluate students’ co...

Today, even in the presence of IT applications built for the blind, they are facing many problems. Either the applications are for individual’s use or if offer collaborative writing, they are not up to the mark. In the collaborative writing, for instance, in Microsoft Word Add-In and the Google Docs UI, the authors do not know about changes made in the document. Though the former facilitates th...

Hearing impairment was indicated as the second largest proven deficiency in world population. People with such disabilities face many obstacles in their communication and interaction with listeners, even with equal level of cognitive development. Collaborative tools offer the possibility to improve the interaction between listeners and hearing impaired subjects. This study presents an approach ...

Mobile, digital technologies are thought to augment and transcend the limits of our places, yet they raise the issue of what our places are. PlaceMark is a simple, distributed collaborative authoring environment constructed in conjunction with a site-specific writing activity. Here, we examine it as a cultural probe, investigating how new media students engage in collaborative writing and how t...

The paper discusses possibilities of constructing new training objects automatically, on-the-fly as a result of any collaborative activity within a WBT system. Such collaborative activities may include participating in discussion forums, brainstorming sessions, writing document annotations, etc. This feature might be seen as collaborative authoring of training objects in WBT systems. Technical ...