A framework for evaluating the new collaborative writing environments: The Essential Collaborative Writing Toolkit
Abstract: Collaborative writing appears to be an academic exercise whose relevance will only continue to rise, especially with the ever-increasing arrival of newer technology easily appropriated for educational uses. Often this new technology is commercially produced or open source, free, incredibly intuitive to use, and most important, created for the express purpose of facilitating collaborative writing. It is important to understand if these new technologies, commonly referred to as collaborative writing environments, offer a common-sense, low-to-no-cost means for institutions of higher learning to address the challenge of teaching collaborative writing skills to students. A set of criteria, which I coined The Essential Collaborative Writing Toolkit, was drawn from the research literature for the express purpose of evaluating these new collaborative writing environments.