Collaborative problem-solving with listservs in a long-distance engineering classroom

This paper discusses a collaborative classroom effort between Arizona State University and Temple University in which two groups of engineering and technology students used listservs and other communications technology to work long-distance to solve an engineering problem. The paper is focused on the students’ use of listservs, including audience- and writing-related issues that we observed, and how one team’s better collaboration on the listserv may have helped it produce a better final product. While the underlying causes as to why one team performed better are unclear, we did observe that the more successful team employed certain rhetorical and collaborative strategies in its use of the technology, strategies that we feel contributed to this success