2005 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings

0-7803-9028-8/05/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE.

Design of Virtual Spaces for Successful Collaboration in Technical and Professional Communication Online Classes

Carole Yee New Mexico Institute of Mining and TechnologyCyee@nmt.edu

Iver Davidson New Mexico Institute of Mining and TechnologyIDavidson@admin.nmt.edu

Abstract

Technical and professional communication courses, whether conducted on-campus or online, benefit from the inclusion of student collaborative projects. But designing these projects presents a number of pedagogical challenges, challenges that are heightened in the online world but which at the same time lend themselves to amelioration as a result of the careful planning and technological interventions required by the constraints of distance instruction. Planning involves providing students with skills and tools for setting goals and outcomes, managing interpersonal conflicts, and devising strategies for decision-making and peer review. Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) offer some exciting opportunities for enhancing online meetings and courses to engage students in problem-based learning. Breeze, an EMS, will be demonstrated at the IPCC Conference 2005 as a possible tool for online classroom and meeting room collaborations.

Keywords: online course design, distance education pedagogy, teamwork, electronic meeting systems (EMS), collaboration, problem-based learning.

The Pedagogical Challenges

Collaborative projects and teamwork are valued but demanding instructional components in the technical communication classroom. In order to introduce their students to experiences that will prepare them for future professional challenges, instructors design and then assign team projects,

sometimes based on “real” world or workplace situations, sometimes even working with a real client. Researchers have identified and discussed many of the complex skills necessary for students to collaborate successfully on writing projects, providing instructors with guidelines and suggestions that can help class collaborative projects succeed. [1] This paper and presentation will explore some of the pedagogical and technological considerations of incorporating the collaborative project in an online course. Because on-campus and online classrooms share many of the same pedagogical learning objectives and instructional styles [2], in the technical communication classroom, whether synchronous or asynchronous, online or face-to-face, instructors expect their students to learn and demonstrate the skills involved in teamwork and collaborative writing. This paper will look at some of the instructional considerations involved in creating a successful collaborative space and how some of those very considerations could be enhanced by using electronic meeting systems (EMS), suited perhaps particularly well to the online classroom and meeting room. [3]

A Collaborative Culture

A collaborative culture involves what some have described as a “collaborative ethic” [4] and others have described as a “synergistic effort” [3]. Classrooms, whether real or virtual, like all groups, do not and probably cannot always achieve the “group dynamic level” of interaction, which allows a team to function beyond just cooperation, to achieve a level of synergy, producing a superior product and an enhanced learning or production experience for the team members. [3]

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Among the challenges are the following: 1. Clearly laying out the expectations and

procedures for the project. These should involve defining the project mission and objectives (abstract goals) and identifying project outcomes (measurable results).

2. Quickly enabling a social nexus capable of planning, monitoring, executing, and self-evaluating the project. This challenge means immediately defining team member roles and responsibilities and the level of integration the team members aspire to achieve.

3. Devising a means for evaluating individual and team contributions to the project, and, through clear expression of these means, working to ensure an equitable distribution of work. This often involves creating a project calendar and a work plan. Team members must also agree on how conflicts within the group will be resolved.

4. Encouraging the exploration and use of the tools of collaboration, in the form of common technical languages and mechanisms for the sharing of materials. This step might involve developing a style sheet for the project, including suggested language choices, and selecting the technical tools. Team members might use e-mail, the telephone, video conferencing, and groupware software (such as IBM’s Lotus Notes and Microsoft’s Outlook), to facilitate their sharing of materials and information. [5]

5. Providing a means for a final presentation of the end product to the instructor, the client, or both, including possible multimedia features.

Educational Models

Researchers in Technical Communication have pointed recently to the open source development model as promising for technical communication education. [6] [7] According to Eric S. Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, open source development promotes “problem-based learning,” without also promoting proprietary control of the source code. [8] Technical communication scholars suggest that open source development provides a language for technical communication pedagogy to promote “the collaborative nature of knowledge creation.” [7] The un-proprietary nature of open source development applies as well to the features

of courses or meetings supported by electronic meeting systems, which allow students (or meeting participants), whether online or in the same room, actively and anonymously, if that option is chosen,to engage in discussion, problem-solving, brain storming, and collaborative writing. The notable features of EMS-supported learning that make its applications in board rooms especially exciting apply equally well to online discussions and collaborations, whether in the virtual classroom, meeting room, or corporate classroom. [3]

The workplace certainly requires teamwork. The academic discipline of technical communication recognizes that students, whether enrolled via distance or on campus, must be taught teamwork and have collaborative practice. Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence even makes the point that “small groups are, quite simply, the basic organizational building block of excellent companies.” [9] To learn to work successfully in teams, students must be provided with conflict skills, decision-making strategies, and critical feedback tools, and course syllabi must be structured to include units on interpersonal interactions, setting goals, defining roles, and problem-solving. [10] Armed with those fundamental teambuilding skills, students and professionals can succeed in teamwork in the classroom as well as in the workplace. With EMS-supported virtual spaces, the online classroom and workspace can be structured to support those same teambuilding skills.

Technical communication research has analyzed the many challenges in classroom collaboration. An important and notable distinction scholars have made and underscored is that between the expectations and environments for students in the classroom where learning is the goal and the workplace where product is the goal. [11] Students and professionals recognize the differences, too, in negotiating classroom and workplace assignments, where the required symbolic analysis will be situated to the specific context. The challenge for the classroom instructor is to replicate as much as possible the workplace environment for students, taking into account the very different goals of the two situations. Using EMS software can help instructors provide students with the experience of a professional team project. [12]

The online instructor must create a virtual classroom space where students can work together

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on collaborative assignments, peer review one another’s written and oral presentation, and form successful teams. Successfully handling the challenges of teaching collaboration in an online space may at first seem insurmountable, but features of electronic meeting systems can help address these challenges because this software allows instructors to diminish communication inhibitors, thereby, radically changing the dynamics of group interactions. Ideas can become decoupled from personality, status, and role, freeing participants to evaluate ideas equally. [3]

The Lecture Model

Distance courses at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology presently feature live lectures delivered by two-way Polycom™ streams between studios, live streams of those lectures delivered on the Web in Windows Media Format and Flash video, recorded online streams of lectures in those formats, as well as lectures recorded onto DVD. Instructors can communicate in “real-time” using both verbal and non-verbal cues, preserving for the distant student a sense of the social environment of the classroom. Students participating live online have a limited ability to interact with the instructor via Web-based audio and synchronous text chat. Supporting textual material is available online via WebCT. While this format works relatively well for traditional lecture-based classes at the university, distance educators have felt limited in their ability to allow distance students to collaborate because of the limitations of tools supplied by WebCT: Web-based email, discussion forums, live text chat, and document upload and download.

Optimally, a collaboration system would support the best roles typically found in working groups: initiators, information seekers, information givers, coordinators, evaluators, harmonizers, gatekeepers, standard setters, followers, group observers, blockers, and avoiders. [13] To preserve as many of these roles as possible, an online collaborative space must provide many of the benefits of face-to-face collaboration: immediate, clear communication; ability to stay on-task; and support for group dynamics.

In addition, sharing, manipulation, and creation of documents – synchronously as well as asynchronously -- are also necessary for quality collaboration. Heath, Luff, Kuzuoka, Yamazaki,

and Oyama speak of the need for a “coherent environment in which to accomplish action and interaction,” and “resources with which to undertake seemingly simple actions such as pointing, reference, or manipulating objects and artifacts within the remote location.” [14]

Online collaboration must also preserve the advantages introduced by way of the Internet’s anytime, anywhere capabilities. “The benefits of asynchronous collaboration include more than just convenience,” note Dufner, Kwon, and Hadidi. In asynchronous communication, they maintain, “students have time to reflect and think about a problem.” There’s also less pressure to finish prematurely, they say. [15]

Enter Breeze

There are a growing number of electronic meeting systems (EMS) on the market today. They are alternately called web conferencing (and sometimes video conferencing) systems. Such systems have so far seen most of their growth in business communications, where they have helped reduce costly travel to and from meetings and have allowed for simultaneous training of corporate workers across a broad geographic region. Macromedia Breeze is a web-based EMS that makes use of the Flash plug-in, already found in more than 97 percent of today’s web browsers. New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology was attracted to Breeze by its cross-platform, web-based nature (requiring no other software installed on any of the users’ computers), by its feature set, and by the familiarity of the university’s distance education staff with other web and graphics programs produced by Macromedia, including Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks, which constitute a major portion of the university’s online course creation toolset.

Breeze consists of three modules: Breeze Live, Breeze Presentation, and Breeze Training; for the purposes of constructing a collaboration environment, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology decided to use Breeze Live exclusively. Presentation provides an asynchronous content delivery that the distance education administrator didn’t think necessary for the present collaboration project, while Training is designed to add tracking, analysis, and administrative functions to the other two modules.

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The Breeze Live environment is made up of self-contained areas of content and utilities called “pods.” A collection of pods can be saved in any number of layouts. Three default layouts are provided: Slides, Screen Sharing, and Discussion.

Pods include: • Video and/or audio of the participants. • Chat, allowing participants to exchange

text messages. • Content, an area for displaying PowerPoint

slides, Word documents, and other files. An optional whiteboard overlay allows annotations and markings on the content.

• A list of participants’ name, along with icons they can set that indicate whether the speaker is speaking too fast, too slow, too loud, or too quietly, and up-and-down thumb icons for instant polls.

• File sharing, allowing presenters to distribute files to meeting participants.

• Notes, an area for the presenter to type a live text message.

• Polls, with which presenters can quickly set up multiple polls of meeting participants.

• Screen, for displaying any computer desktop view that the presenters want to share with participants.

• Web links, allowing presenters to direct participants’ browsers to display specific websites.

• A freestanding whiteboard.

Macromedia uses the terms “presenter” and “participant” to differentiate between users with different capabilities within Breeze. Presenters can broadcast their video and/or audio to the online meeting room using a webcam and a microphone, can upload documents, create polls, and turn on and off the whiteboard. Participants can text chat, participate in polls, and read and page through uploaded material (unless the presenter is controlling display of the material). Participants can be promoted to a presenter role by a presenter. The roles of presenter/participant can also be assigned when the meeting room is created. All users can be presenters at once, which is the ideal state for collaboration. From these tools, then, we constructed our virtual collaboration space and began ad hoc testing.

• The video/audio pods are to be used for live, immediate communication.

Depending on the number of collaborators and the available bandwidth, a video and/or audio connection can be enabled for each collaborator, with the option of freezing to a still frame all videos except the present speakers’ to reduce needed bandwidth. Use of video, we decided, could and perhaps should be limited to introductions and other instances when the focus is on team-building or when the expression of the speaker’s personality, as provided by visual cues, is important to the matter being communicated. In a situation where the collaborators’ focus would be on a shared document, it was reasoned, audio alone would be sufficient and video might only a bandwidth-costly distraction,

• The chat pod is to be the default synchronous discussion mode – easy to use, requiring no advance setup of a webcam or microphone, and allowing extended, thoughtful exchanges. Text chat also has the advantage of providing anonymity for the participants if it is decided that greater freedom of expression may come from such a situation.

• The content areas, combined with the whiteboard overlay, are where collaborators can display their contributions in real time along with audio commentary. Others in the group can point to, underline, circle, cross out, or highlight sections of the documents as they are discussed, and add additional text for consideration. Documents displayed in this way remain within the virtual meeting area later for asynchronous consideration by collaborators.

• The “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” icons next to each participants’ name can be used for quick up-and-down polls, as can the actual poll utility, which can be controlled by any presenter.

• File-sharing is where group members can upload documents for others to download for later review.

• The notes pods are for quick, live text communications with participants – such things as agendas, bits of text, and general notices to group members.

• Screen sharing allows group members to display documents, programs, images, web sites or anything else from their desktop

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that may be pertinent in the collaboration process.

• The web links pod is another way to share resources found on the web.

• The whiteboard, used independently of the content pod, lets group members use diagrams, flowcharts, and other graphic devices to illustrate concepts and approaches.

The authors of this paper look forward to demonstrating and discussing the possibilities for Breeze, an EMS, within a collaborative environment during their IPCC 2005 conference presentation.

References

[1] See especially Collaborative Writing in Industry: Investigations in Theory and Practice.Mary M. Lay and William M. Karis, Eds. Amityville, NY: Baywood Press, 1991; Lisa Ede and Angela Lunsford, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing.Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990; Lester Faigley and Tomas Miller, “What We Learn from Writing on the Job,” College English,vol. 44, pp. 557-569, 1982 (Rpt. in Perspectives on the Profession of Technical Communication. Ed. Madeline Flammia. Orlando: Society for Technical Communication, 1994); James Paradis, David Dobrin, and Richard Miller, “Writing at Exxon, ITD: Notes on the WRITING ENVIRONMENT of an R&D Organization,” in Writing in Nonacademic Settings, Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami, Eds. New York: Gilford Press, 1985, pp. 281-307.

[2] Mike Markel, “Distance Education and the Myth of the New Pedagogy,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 13, no. 2, pp.208-222, 1999.

[3] William L. Tullar, Paula R. Kaiser, and Pierre A. Balthazard, “Group Work and Electronic Meeting Systems: From Boardroom TO Classroom,” Business Communication Quarterly,vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 53-65, 1998.

[4] Nancy Roundy Blyler and Charlotte Thralls, “Making Collaboration Work,” Bulletin of the Association of Business Communication, vol. 57, no. 1, 50-52, 1994.

[5] Richard Johnson-Sheehan, “Working in Teams,” in Technical Communication Today. New York: Longman, 2005, pp. 352-378.

[6] Brenton D. Faber, “Educational Models and Open Source: Resisting the Proprietary University,” in SIGDOC ‘02, Toronto, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Groups (SIG), 2002, pp. 31-38.

[7] Brenton Faber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, “Knowledge Politics: Open Sourcing Education,” Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers. Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie, Eds. Amityville, NY: Baywood Press, 2005.

[8] Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar [online]. Available:http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/index.html

[9] T. J. Peters and R. H. Waterman, In Search of Excellence. New York: Harper & Row, p. 126, 1982

[10] Susan R. Glaser, “Teamwork and Communication: A 3-year Case Study of Change,” Management Communication Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3, 282-296, 1994.

[11] Aviva Freedman and Christine Adam, “Learning to Write Professionally: ‘Situated Learning’ and the Transition from University to Professional Discourse,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 395-427, 1996.

[12] Louise Rehling, “Teaching in a High-Tech Conference Room: Academic Adaptations and Workplace Simulations, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 98-113, 2005.

[13] Hope E. Chandler, “The Complexity of Online Groups: A Case Study of Asynchronous Distributed Collaboration,” ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 17-24, February 2001.

[14] Christian Heath, Paul Luff, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Keiichi Yamazaki, and Shinya Oyama, “Creating Coherent Environments for Collaboration,” in Proceedings of ECSCW, Bonn, Germany:

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European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2001, pp. 119-138.

[15] Donna Dufner, Ojoung Kwon, and Rassule Hadidi. (1999, March) “A Collaborative Learning Environment for Geographically Distributed Information Technology Students and Working Professionals,” Communications of Association of Information Systems, [online]. Vol. 1, Article 12. Available: http://cais.isworld.org/articles/1-12/default.asp?View=html&x=55&y=13

About the Authors

Carole Yee (Ph.D., University of New Mexico; M.A., University of New Mexico; B.A., University of Pittsburgh) is professor of English at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where she has taught courses in instructional and persuasive writing and administered the technical communication program. She now serves as associate vice president for academic affairs and dean of students at NMT. She has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Profession Communication.

Iver Davidson (Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, M.F.A., Vermont College; B.A., North Dakota State University) is distance education administrator at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He has also worked as multimedia manager for the Internet education startup company, Class.com.

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