Analysing a collaborative writing activity in order to improve tutor's perception of individual contributions of learners

This paper is interesting in the tutor's perception of the learner's contribution to a collective work. In particular, we propose means of individual perception of a collaborative writing activity. We present what a collaborative writing activity is and what the tutor's needs of perception are in order to follow a collaborative writing activity. Then, we present our propositions of perception of individual contribution through the analysis of discussions.

1 Introduction

During the follow-up of a distance collective activity, the tutor needs to understand directly the learner's individual progression, in order to support each learner in the collective task. The success or the failure of a collective work is evaluated from the contribution of individuals to the elaboration of the common task [1]. To evaluate the learner's contribution, the tutor has to recognize each learner in the final collaborative production. For that, s/he needs some tools which help him/her perceive each learner's activity as clearly as possible. We propose that the tutor's perception of the learner's activity be possible through the consultation of the learner's individual productions, the consultation of his/her contribution to the discussions and collective productions and through the visualization of his/her place in the group dynamics. Our context of work is the collaborative writing in French as a Foreign Language field. So, we take an interest in describing how to perceive individual contribution to a collaborative writing activity. First, we describe what a collaborative writing activity is, and what the tutor's needs to perceive each learner's contributions are. Then, we present our propositions to analyse the learner's contributions.