Distributed collaborative writing: a comparison of spoken and written modalities for reviewing and revising documents

Previous research indicates that voice annotation helps reviewers to express the more complex and social aspects of a collaborative writing task. Little direct evidence exists, however, about the effect of voice annotations on the writers who must use such annotations. To test the effect, we designed an interface intended to alleviate some of the problems associated with the voice modality and undertook a study with two goals; to compare the nature and quantity of voice and written comments, and to evaluate how writers responded to comments produced in each mode. Writers were paired with reviewers who made either written or spoken annotations from which the writers revised. The study provides direct evidence that the greater expressivity of the voice modality, which previous research suggested benefits reviewers, produces annotations that writers also find usable. Interactions of modality with the type of annotation suggest specific advantages of each mode for enhancing the processes of review and revision

The role of elaborations in learning a skill from an instructional text.

In these studies, we examined the role of elaborations for subjects learning a procedural skill (viz., using a personal computer) from an instructional text. In Experiment 1, we compared two sources of elaborations: those provided by the author and those generated by learners while reading. In the latter condition, subjects were given advance information about the tasks they were to perform so that they would generate more specific task-related elaborations while reading. Each source of elaborations facilitated skill performance. This result contrasts with results of the past experiments testing declarative knowledge in which author-provided elaborations were found to hurt performance. In Experiment 2, the author-provided elaborations were classified into those illustrating the syntax of the operating system commands and those explaining basic concepts and their applicability. Syntax elaborations produced significant facilitation for experienced and novice computer users. Concept elaborations produced no reliable improvement.</p