How Students Collaboratively Write using Google Docs

Writing collaboratively is increasing in many professions, including among college students. Students are writing many assignments collaboratively, learning as they go. Writing collaboratively, however, takes coordination and awareness of who has done what. We offer a new tool, DocuViz, which displays the entire revision history of Google Docs, showing more than the one-step-at-a-time kind of snapshot currently available in Docs and Word. Using DocuViz, we analyzed 99 students’ reports from a Project Management class and found it to reveal interesting patterns of collaborative writing. We believe this tool would be useful not just for researchers, but also for the authors themselves and instructors.ye