The Use of Online Collaborative Writing Tools by Technical ...

Applied ResearchUse of Online Collaborative Writing ToolsFigure 2 shows the respondents’ answers to question5 on the student survey. As seen in the figure, studentsused the tools primarily for classes—more than halfused them for mostly or only class work—while fewused OCWTs solely for professional work. I received 59student responses to this question.Open-Ended QuestionsThe survey’s open-ended questions focused on whichOCWTs the respondents were using, why they chosethose tools, how they used those tools, and how theyfelt about the tools. These questions were the same forpractitioners and students alike. In this section, I willintroduce the practitioners’ and students’ responsesto these questions, beginning with a general overviewof the codes I extracted from responses, followed bya discussion of some of the most popular OCWTsmentioned.Overview of qualitative responses. I assigneda total of 529 practitioner codes, extracted from 57responses to questions 10, 11, and 12. There were atotal of 145 reason codes, and the most common reasoncategory was required (48 mentions) followed by features(41 mentions). In terms of individual codes, the mostlisted were required-organization/company (24 mentions),features-versioning (17 mentions), and price-free (12mentions).For students, I assigned a total of 471 codes from 41responses. The students’ most common reason category(out of 133) was features, which was tied with requiredat 34 mentions each. Additionally, the most commonindividual codes were price-free (16 mentions), requiredclass/school(16 mentions), features-security (13 mentions),and features-comments (7 mentions). Figure 3 showsthe relative amount of practitioner and student reasoncategory responses.Out of 200 practitioner use codes, the mostcommon category was collaboration, which had 102codes, and then document management with 53 codes.The most common individual codes were collaborationwritingwith 35 mentions, document storage with 29mentions, and asynchronous with 22 mentions.Out of 185 student use codes, the most commonuse category was collaboration. Specifically, the mostcommon individual codes were collaboration-writing(35 mentions), with document management-documentstorage (34 mentions) and collaboration-asynchronous(33 mentions) immediately behind. Figure 4 shows thebreakdown of practitioner and student use categories.For practitioners, there were a total of 184 opinioncodes. Recall that I coded these responses twice: oncein terms of the overall tone of the response (positive,negative, and neutral) and again in terms of specificcodes. For the first coding, the overall attitudes of thepractitioners toward the tools were mostly positive with49 responses (59%), while neutral and negative had 17(21%) responses each. The students had 153 opinionsfrom the first coding. In terms of overall tone, thestudents gave 44 positive (46%), 14 neutral (20%), and11 negative (16%) responses.Figure 3. Reason Code CategoriesFigure 4. Use Code Categories34 Technical Communication l Volume 60, Number 1, February 2013