Search results

Working together in groups is a common and emphasized feature in today's society, and higher educational settings often utilize group assignments to enable students to develop collaborative skills. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe and analyze applied strategies and the patterns that emerge during students online collaborative writing in higher education group assignments. The research questions that this article aims to answer are (1) which patterns of students online collaborative writing emerge in higher education group assignments and (2) what strategies of online collaborative writing do higher education students apply in group assignments?

This study's design builds on Conversation Analysis to explore visualizations of Google Docs revision history of online collaborative writing documents. Documents from 25 student groups were the basis of the analysis. The visualizations used in this project are produced with the DocuViz Chrome extension.

The findings suggest that visualizations can provide a quick and fairly accurate estimate of collaborative strategies used when students write together online. Three patterns of document growth were identified, two of which could be directly linked to strategies for collaboration. Cramming patterns are indicative of low collaboration and concentrating patterns with high levels of collaboration.

The findings provide useful insight for teachers regarding the nature of collaboration taking place during online collaborative writing tasks. By visualizing the revision history, much can be learnt about the nature of the collaboration and of the individual group member's contributions in a student group that otherwise remains largely invisible to the teacher.

Prior studies have combined visualizations with extensive analysis of document content. This investigation shows that an examination of the visualization of the document's revision history can be used to draw conclusions about the nature of collaboration during the online writing process.

The purpose of this study is to identify temporary workers' (temps') expected conditions for learning when they are leased to a client company (CC) for numerical flexibility.

The analysis is based on a phenomenological approach containing 121 transcribed interviews with employees and managers who were active in more than 10 CCs' in seven industries and from seven temporary work agencies.

One important finding is that the CC expects temps not to learn something about the surrounding organization, but to limit themselves only to the concrete tasks assigned to them. Another is that temps' opportunities to influence organizational conditions in the CCs seem to be cut off in a strategic way.

Results are valid for interviewees' expressed thoughts and expectations about temps' workplace learning, not about an actual separation between knowledge and actions in the working conditions.

CCs associate temps with learning backgrounds that allow them to perform subordinate tasks, such as routine, instructional, or regulatory duties. They associate regular staff with more advanced learning backgrounds and tasks more directly related to occupation and workplace. CCs could benefit from accepting the exchange of knowledge and competence between temps and the company, rather than neglecting it.

The originality of this paper lies in its contribution to the relatively unexplored topic of workplace learning and leaders and employees' expectations of temps.