The collaborative writing by means of digital tools: Resignifying textual production in the school context

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze the construction of collaborative writing practices among a group of secondary schools students, by means of the use of some Internet tools. More specifically, such an investigation analyzes a corpus of textual productions generated over the course of a teaching project of a digital school news paper developed in a State school, located in Campinas SP, Brazil, between August and December 2008, together with a group of volunteers. The volunteers consisted of nineteen secondary students and a Portuguese teacher. This Constitutes as a qualitative investigation, situated within the Applied Linguistics field, and which is characterized, more specifically, as an action research, whose intention is not restricted to understanding or describing the world of practices, but, above of all, to trying to change it. The study is supported by the theoretical discussion about the digital revolution that occurred with the Web 2.0 advent. In particular, I show how changes inherent to the passage from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 reflected on the Internet creation processes, more specifically, on the (multi)authorship and collaboration on the web by means of tools which promote collaborative writing practices. Finally, as analytical devices for analyzing the data generated, I adopt the references proposed by Horton et al. (1991), and adapted by Lowry et al. (2004), which are based upon: collaborative writing activities, collaborative writing strategies, collaborative writing roles and collaborative writing modes.

Key words: collaborative writing, Web 2.0, digital tools, school.