Education Students’ Use of Collaborative Writing Tools in Collectively Reflective Essay Papers

Google Docs and EtherPad are Web 2.0 tools providing opportunity for multiple users to work online on the same document consecutively or simultaneously.Over the last few years a number of research papers on the use of these collaborative tools in a teaching and learning environment have been published.This work builds on that of Brodahl, Hadjerrouit, and Hansen (2011) expanding its case study.The theoretical framework is the same as the one underlying Brodahl et al. (2011), drawing on two learning theories, the social-constructivist learning theory and the community of practice, and their relationships to collaborative tools.The literature review is extended to cover the recent research work in the field, related to Web 2.0 technologies in higher education.The case study of Brodahl et al. (2011) involved 201 education students who had just begun their four-year initial teacher education.However, 24 students are omitted in the current work, and the result tables from Brodahl et al. (2011) accordantly updated.Disregarding particular groups of students was due to their specific local dispersion, as they conducted their entire assignment and collectively reflective essay paper at the same physical location and, with respect to this, reported the use of collaborative tools as superfluous and unwanted in their setting.Partly based on the same survey, this work presents a case study investigating education students' perceptions of collaborative writing reflective essay papers.However, where Brodahl et al. (2011) presented a solely quantitative study derived from closed-ended questions, this work incorporates the survey's open-ended questions in a qualitative analysis.The analysis also draws on the students' written reflections on their experiences.The qualitative analysis supports the conclusion of Brodahl et al. (2011) that technical problems were a major issue, mostly related to EtherPad.All but one complaint about technical difficulties stemmed from EtherPad users during a limited period of time.