Wolcott, J.R., & Robertson, J.E. (1997). The World Wide Web as an environment for collaborative research: An experiment in graduate education. International Journal of Educational Communications, 3 (2/3), 219-236.
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In this article the authors try to answer the following questions: What happens when a group of researchers attack a single problem from different perspectives, working in an environment in which research findings, notes, insights, and inquiries can be shared and linked on a regular and continuing basis? How is the resulting information to be integrated into a single hypertext document? How is such a document, composed over time, to be designed and edited? How is such a document to be constructed so that it will be useful to others? These are questions the ITF had to deal with when building the SOE Home Page.

In this experiment, students were divided into five teams of four students, using a jigsaw method, and each team had to plan a large theatre production using only e-mail and the WWW for exchanging ideas and information. Each group had a webmaster, and all the e-mail was appended to a single file on a daily basis. One of the first problems the undergraduate students encountered was having to learn HTML, since there were no editors available at the time. In the next experiment, students had to consider the business expenses of the theatre production as well, as they planned their production. Their home pages included data from budget spreadsheets, photographs of costumes, props, lighting, etc. Finally, this was tried with a class of doctoral students in theatre history, divided into four teams of two. These students, in contrast, met weekly face to face, and had private as well as public file space, plus an HTML editor.

The look and feel of the documents evolved over time, driven by the research materials uncovered by the students. A model emerged that captured the relationship between the topics of research, which then led to the navigation scheme for the hypertext document. The collaborative nature of the project necessitated specific file naming conventions, links, and appended notes explaining some of the information on the pages. Editing - again, an ongoing process - produced consistency in page layout, removed duplicate files, and efficient navigation. The two course leaders (not the students) performed the final editing.

Depending on whether the teams were dualistic (thinking in terms of right and wrong answers) or multiplistic (seeing things from many different perspectives), their final products were simply indexed or richly hypertexted. Students with a dualistic (or serialistic) approach found it very difficult to produce hypertext documents, despite repeated encouragement and instruction toward a nonlinear approach. The authors did not determine whether this obstacle could be overcome by alternative instructional methods.