Claudia Brandelero Rizzi (claudiab@inf.ufrgs.br )

Cleuza Maria Maximino Carvalho Alonso (alonso@ccsh.ufsm.br) Presenter

Louise Marguerite Jeanty de Seixas (seixas@farmacia.ufrgs.br )

Janete Sander Costa (jscosta@cpovo.net )

Fabrício Raupp Tamusiunas (fabricio@penta.ufrgs.br )

Ademir da Rosa Martins (ademir@pgie.ufrgs.br )

Fone: (55) 02151-316 -3986; Fax: (55) 02151-316-3985; E-mail: pgie@pgie.ufrgs.br

Key words: EquiText; Collaborative Writing; Groupware; Distance Learning

1. Introduction:

Distance Learning in Brazil had its big incentive in the late 1990s, through the Law 9.394/96, The Law of Bases and Guidelines of the National Education - LDB (MEC, 1999) of the Brazilian Government. In that instance the Government points out new directions to be followed by all the stages of the Brazilian Educational System. The Government also establishes new norms and characteristics in order to make distance learning stand out as one of the alternatives for the inclusion of the largest possible number of people in the educational system.

Until then, teaching on a distance learning basis suggested the reproduction of the traditional methods where teaching most of the time was forwarded through traditional means as by the postage of print materials or via Radio and Television transmission.

As far as the traditional teaching system, Brazil has already been moved forward and improved in many ways the teaching methodology, applying the most modern learning/teaching theories. Some places however have resisted to the innovations in education and still a few others even the most traditional techniques had difficulties in their application. The distance aspect is of considerable importance in a country of 8.500,000 Km², with the resources not always being well distributed amongst the 155 million inhabitants.

On the other hand, within this picture, progress in information technology woke up in some groups of educators the challenge of doing distance learning, not only with the new contents and teaching/learning methodologies but also using new techniques of information and of communication. The computer at the same time could be a repository and a searching tool of information; it could be used as a learning environment and it could still be contacted with any other linked machine in the Internet. So, the challenge was launched and the first seeds started to germinate.

In the same year of 1996 the first Doctorate Program in Information Technology and Education at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Brazil, has been launched and at present it is at the Federal instance for official recognition. It aims at the developing of interdisciplinary work; the continuous production of innovative knowledge in Information Technology, Education, Psychology, Sociology, amongst others; professional teaching training to interact with new technologies in their work environments; the construction of tools to support educational environments. It is part of the philosophy of this Program to improve and to discover new ways to teaching and learning in an educational system of quality, which can appropriately provide for the needs and the desires of that new society. The new technology resources brought by Information Technology should be taken advantage of by the Brazilian Educational System in order to prepare the new citizen for a new type of society to follow the new stages of human evolution (PPGIE, 1999).

The students of this Post Graduate Program in Information Technology and Education come from the most different professional areas and backgrounds; also, from all over this huge country of ours. That heterogeneity associated to the search of a common goal is translated in continuous communication and collaboration amongst all in a most mutual and enriching experience.

In this context, in partnership with students of the more technical areas of Information Technology of the PPGIE/UFRGS, EquiText – a cooperative text elaboration tool – has been created and developed on a team basis and in an asynchronous mode via the WWW.

The theoretical model in which this project is based on relies on Vygotsky’s sociointeracionist theory. The main presupposition of this work is based on the assumption that man is made of body and mind, as a social and biological being, and as a participant of a cultural historical process. "Vygotsky defends the idea of a continuous interaction between the changeable social conditions and the biological bases of the human behavior. From basic elementary and organic structures, determined basically by maturation, new and more complex mental functions are formed, which depend on the social experiences that children are exposed to". (Oliveira & Davis, 1993:49).

As far as Vygotsky’s theory is concerned, every superior form of behavior appears twice during its development: at first, in a collective way, as an external procedure of the behavior, that is, inter-psychologically; later, it will change into an individual mode, or into the person's own behavior or, in other words, intra-psychologically.

This inner process can determine a true reconstruction of that which has been manifested at first in an external level. In that way, the child's cultural development has a social origin, built in a double sense (Wertsch, 1988, apud Coll 1996:28): "…first, because the superior psychological functions - and with them all the cultural forms - are social constructions; and second, because its construction in the individual level, its interiorization, is rendered from the interactions that the child maintains with the adults and other agents mediators of his/her surroundings in which such functions spring up". It is clear from Vygotsky's theory the idea that the individual reconstructs and recreates the meanings transmitted by his/her cultural group.

From the reconstruction postulates and recreation of the cultural meanings, Vygotsky developed the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). It is only possible to the child to accomplish actions that are next to those that he/she has already consolidated. In Vygotsky’s theory, the ZPD is constituted by two levels: the level of real development and the level of potential development. The capacity to accomplish a task alone, it is constituted in the level of real development, while the level of potential development is the stage in that the child carries out tasks with the help of the other.

According to Oliveira (1993:59) " That possibility of alteration of a person's acting for the interference of another is fundamental in Vygotsky’s theory. In the first place, because it represents, in fact, a moment of the development: it is not any individual that can, starting from the help of the other, to accomplish any task. That is, the capacity to benefit of a collaboration of another person will happen in a certain development level, not before ". The level of potential development is characterized, therefore in a stage in which the interference of the other affects the result of the individual action significantly, but it is in the collaborative learning that ZPD is activated.

Thus, what can be inferred from Vygotsky’s theoretical presuppositions is that he redefines the study of interaction, that is to say that in the educational process, it is characterized as the central point to understand the change processes produced by the interactions accomplished in school situations. It is through the human interaction that man has access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind and when he acquires it, he/she constitutes him/herself a subject, enhancing the essential element of this interaction - the social collaboration mediated by tools and signs.

The alterations which happens in man's mind by the use of tools and signs as external support allows to mediate an stimulus, representing it in other places or occasions. The systems of signs are of cultural nature, they have a social origin and they are arbitrarily conventionalized. Their appropriation takes place in situations where only individuals interact socially, because only those people that dominate them are able to transmit them. So it is the language that constitutes the great system of tool mediation.

In the Brazilian context, the educator Paulo Freire claims that the discovery of the possibility of teaching is approached through the historical social relationship of learning. In Freire’s words: "... it was from the social learning that, historically, men and women discovered that it was possible to teach. So it was, from the social learning that throughout the time men and women noticed that it was possible - then, it was needed - to work ways, routes, methods of teaching. Learning was preceded by teaching or, in other words, teaching was diluted in the melting experience of learning" (Freire, 1996:26).

According to Freire (1996:31), "... when being produced, the new knowledge overcomes another one that has been new and became old and that ‘agrees’ to be surpassed tomorrow by another one. Then it is so fundamental to know the existent knowledge as to know that we are open and capable of producing knowledge not existent yet. Teaching, learning and doing research, deal with those two moments of the gnosis cycle: the first in which one teaches, one also learns the already existent knowledge and the second in which someone produces the knowledge not yet existent."

In the epigraph the author still detaches the interrelation to teaching-learning as the producer of the knowledge originated from the dialogical teacher/student relationship or, according to his words "to bring the other one close to the intimacy of the movement of his/her thought" (Ibid. 1996:132).

This point is reinforced for (Jaffee, 1999) with the idea of the active learning: the "learn by doing" in activities at distance, it is usually materialized through texts, that are not simple transcriptions, but rather products of a reflection, reorganization and reformulation of concepts, in a complex process of discoveries.

The importance of this subject of own and collective elaboration is also recognized by Demo (1996:24) that postulates "... when a text is just read reproductively or copied imitatively, reasoning, questioning, knowing how to think, hasn’t shown up yet. When it is interpreted, it already supposes some form of participation of the subject, no matter how incipient the subject is, therefore the understanding of the sense is looked for. To understand the meaning of a text implicates in the establishment of relationships between text and meaning, to start moving manners of understanding and to understand, to investigate alternative possibilities of understanding, to notice and to give meaning. This dynamics still moves forward, when it comes to know how to do and to re-do a text, changing the roles from reader to author. As the elaboration proper comes up, the knowing how to think and the learning to learn becomes visible."

The notion of learning to learn once again is seen not as an isolated learning, but that learning which also emerges from the interactions produced within the activities accomplished by the team and, more specifically, from the elaboration of texts produced as a team work.

The challenge of a written production in a collaborative way demands from the participants, the emphasis and the will of doing so, in a continuous process of displaying ideas, arguments and negotiations. This process requires an agile dynamics, so that the spent effort can effectively be driven to the creative act in itself and not in the search of ways to overcome the difficulties of the mechanical act of writing the material. In other words, in an interaction process where people are communicating via the machine, the text in construction should be equally accessible to all, at the same time. It would thus allow all participants to do and to see the alterations, where, when and for whom they had been done, eventually, why were they done. Only then each participant would be able to follow "the movement of the thought" of the other, truly participating of the process.

We have opted for those principles by virtue of the pertinence of the thesis mentioned above to give theoretical support to the construction of the EquiText. According to Lévy (1999:7) "New ways to think and to live together are being elaborated in the world of the telecommunications and of Information Technology. The relationships among men, their work, their own intelligence, in fact depend on the incessant metamorphosis of the informative devices of all types. Reading, writing, seeing, hearing, creating, learning is captured more and more by the advances of the Information Technology area. Scientific research cannot be conceived anymore without a complex set of devices that redistributes the old division between experience and theory".

Finally, it is by the use of the new technologies, as the mediator element between man and his/her socio-cultural environment, that substantial changes can be introduced in his/her reality, mainly in education. In this way, new challenges are imposed to educators, because it due to them the construction of methodologies and innovative instruments, that allow a productive work.

3. EquiText

The term "EquiText" is the hybrid result of the combination of the terms "Equipe" (Team, in Portuguese) and "Text"(in English). This combination of a Portuguese and an English word characterizes the functions of this tool: the idea that individuals who are timely, physically and geographically distant can act in a team basis, to write texts collaboratively via the Web.

It offers various possibilities for various applications, especially those related to distance learning or distance communication. The range of such applications can be even expanded, once the EquiText was idealized to be distributed with no costs to any user. Furthermore, the present team tried to be faithful to the theoretical concepts in which the EquiText has been based on. Its development creates a facilitator tool for the (re)construction of knowledge, allowing participants to write their own texts, promoting a constructive and interactive exchange via the Web.

Thus, the EquiText functions give the participant new possibilities in order to manage the accomplishment of several texts being produced simultaneously. In the next sections its functional characteristics will be presented, as well as the current development stage.

EquiText works with the notion of "paragraphs", so that a title, a line or several lines are considered as individual paragraphs. Each inserted paragraph receives a label in order to allow subsequent references. All the inserted paragraphs originate a text.

When the collaborative writing of a text takes place, it is supposed that the theme to be investigated has already been defined and, therefore, it motivates research about it. As the theme has been defined, the first and natural action that follows is an initial bibliographical research, which will be the insertion of one or more paragraphs.

A paragraph, as it has been inserted, can be altered, added to another, moved or excluded. An excluded paragraph can be recovered and reintegrated to the text. All those actions have an individual registry, so it is possible to follow the evolution of the text verifying who did an action in which paragraph, and when it occurred (date, hour).

The EquiText environment considers three different but not exclusive users: 1) the manager; 2) the theme proponent; and 3) the text writing collaborator. Such characters are not mutually exclusive because one of them can assume simultaneously the three jobs.

The manager deals with those operational subjects such as the installation of the system and its maintenance. He/she establishes passwords that will allow to distinguishing among the registered users, those who are authorized for the proposed themes. It is supposed that the administrator has enough technical knowledge to take the responsibility for the operation of the EquiText, so including the handling of a Web server system and the Unix (or Linux) operating system.

The second character is the theme proponent. Once he/she is registered in the system and having given the password to access the module of theme creation, it is possible to propose a subject for the text elaboration. As the theme has been defined, this user can supply extra information, as literature or the deadline for the contributions, or other constraints. A constraint will occur when the proponent wishes to delimit the collaborative participants to a restricted group. In this case, there will be a password for this theme, known only by the delimited group.

At last, the text writing collaborator can be any registered user who can access the proposed theme, in a constrained or free mode. When the access is restricted, a group of collaborators will just have knowledge of the password attributed to the theme. When there is free access, it means that this theme is open to any participant. No matter the type of the access, while he/she is cooperating in a text, the collaborator can practice any available operation in the EquiText, such as to insert, alter, move, remove or recover his/her or any other written paragraph which has already been excluded.

Picture 1 shows the general outline of the EquiText. The other items of this section will introduce each function individually.

Picture 1: General outline of the EquiText.

The EquiText starts from a main HTML screen, where the options Registry, Identification, FAQ, Authorship and Contact are presented, as shown in picture two. From this screen, the user can do his/her registry, if it has not been done yet and can proceed to the identification. Each of these functions will be now presented separately.

Picture 2: The main screen of the EquiText.

The function "Registry" allows each user to be registered. Without a registry, the user cannot participate in the collaborative writing of texts. In this operation the user must give his/her full name, e-mail address, a label and a password.

Each time the user enters the EquiText, he must enter the "Identification " function which will requests his/her identification and password. In this way, all the operations that he/she will do after that will be registered by the system. This registration includes the author's identification, the concluded operation, the date and hour.

The function " FAQ " (Frequently Asked Questions) contains information about the operation of the EquiText. When this function is selected, the user can access the set of instructions, these can also be followed by the specific links presented there.

The function "Authorship" presents the history of the EquiText, how to download it and how to install it, as well as the team work who are responsible for the development, maintenance and upgrade of this tool. The function "Contact" displays links for sending messages.

After these stages are completed, the user is then able to work within the EquiText environment. Two options are offered now: "Select an activity" or "Select a text". The first option allows the user to cooperate or to propose a new theme. If he/she wants to propose a theme, he/she should contact the administrator who can give him/her the password in order to access the module of theme creation. At the second option the user can select from the already registered texts, the ones in which he/she wants to contribute.

The module "theme creation" is formed where the proponent will describe the theme or the desired subject for the collaborative writing. As previously mentioned, he/she can make observations as in literature references, maximum size, deadline for collaborations, and others. Providing the deadline is due, the system will reject further collaborations to the text.

The proposed theme can be for free or restricted participation. To differentiate this situation the proponent can attribute a password to the theme in the proposed form. Once the password was attributed, the theme will only be available to those that have accessed it.

Once registered and identified by the system, the user can select, from the proposed themes and from those he/she can access, the theme he/she wants to collaborate. Picture 3 shows an example in which two themes are available.

Once the text has been selected and, if it is the case, the correct password was given, the user enters the writing module. The writing module presents the paragraphs, in a logical order, the date of the last operation in the paragraph, its label, and the edition and observations displayed options.

Picture 3: The selection theme screen of the EquiText.

Picture 4 presents the lay-out of the text edition screen of the EquiText.

Picture 4: Edition screen of the EquiText.

It is possible to see the paragraph frames which facilitate the visualization. It conveys the inclusion of other ideas in any point of the text. In the sub-menu of this screen, there are displayed the Preferences, Visualize, FAQ and the Return options.

Each paragraph shown in the edition mode, has a small "Edit" pencil illustration which, when touched, opens up a menu with the possible edition command, regarding that paragraph selected. These options are:

• To insert a new paragraph before or after the current paragraph: when working one of these options, a form inserts the content of the paragraph that someone wants to include in the text, as well as observations about it, if necessary;
• To alter the content of the current paragraph: when this option is selected, the content of the paragraph is copied in an appropriate form, allowing the desired alterations. It is also possible to make comments or justifications, which could explain why those alterations were made;
• To exclude the paragraph: this option requests a confirmation of the exclusion operation which, once done, it updates the text. In the edition mode, this paragraph is displayed in a fading color, indicating its exclusion. So it is possible to the other collaborators to observe its exclusion, and it allows access to the observations, if they are present, and its subsequent recovery;
• To move a paragraph upwards or downwards: it allows the movement of the paragraph as indicated, upwards or downwards the text;
• To cancel: it just allows the cancellation of the operation.

When any of these functions are executed, the registration will be stored by the system, together with the individual observations of each collaborator, in the working paragraph, creating a record of this paragraph.

The main objective of the "date" column is to help the reader to verify which parts of the text were altered, and when this was done. Another advantage of this information is, for instance, in the case when the user could not accompany the development of the text during a certain time. So, to update the contributions already sent, he/she can analyze them by date, looking for those that were placed there in that specific period of time.

The objective of the "Observations" column is to allow the user to establish a discussion about the topics of the text theme which is being elaborated, proposing, defending or answering ideas, in a collaborative construction . In this column, when an observation is made to the corresponding paragraph, it appears as the notation: " * ". This label constitutes a link which allows the access to the observations. The observations include information about the accomplished actions, the moment of the action (date and time) and the author's name.

The function "Preferences" offers to the user a menu of possibilities for the modification of the color of the bottom and the color of the notebook background paper. These selections are stored in the user's local equipment through cookies. When in another session, the system can recover the user's preferences and can automatically restart it according to his/her personal preferences.

The function "Display" opens up a menu with the following alternatives: Working Mode, Individual Contributions, Partial Drafts, History, and Final Version. These alternatives are presented as follows.

• The function "Working Mode" was already presented , and it is the system default;
• The function "Individual Contributions" presents a list with all the individual contributions to the text. There are displayed here the identification of the participant's name, the type of his/her contribution (inclusion, alteration, movement, exclusion, recovery, new proposal) and the paragraph already been worked. It is possible to see the observations about the proposed contributions, if they have been done.
• With the function "Partial Drafts", the user can request a partial text which will contain the contributions already made to the basic text, until a given date. This option can be useful in several situations, such as getting back the ideas which were discussed in excluded paragraphs or even modified, and in the accompaniment of the evolution of the users' reasoning, which can be seen in the text well written terms and their coherence.
• Using the function "Records", the user can see, in chronological order, all the contributions made to the text. For each contribution the accomplished action is indicated (inclusion, alteration, movement, exclusion), the author of this action and the date and hour of the action.
• When the function "Final Version" is chosen, all the existing paragraphs until then are shown as a unique text. The objective here is to allow the elaborated text to be extracted from the EquiText, converted into a HTML page like any other one. Thus, this page can be opened in any HTML page editor in order to make further alterations and improvements, such as insertion of illustrations, paragraph alignment, colors, etc.

The function "FAQ" is the same described in the option with the same name in the main screen.

The function "Return" allows to leave the edition and the visualization mode returning to that module where the user can select either a theme proposal or to collaborate in a new text.

In the creation of the EquiText the following technological resources were used: HTML, frames, Javascript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and CGI in Perl language. To use the system as a regular user it is necessary to use a browser which can support the technological resources employed, like Netscape Navigator version 4 or superior and Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 or superior. To host the system it is necessary its installation in a Unix server system.

At present, the EquiText team is working in the control of the manager’s passwords, who is in charge of the creation of the other passwords. The operation manual, the FAQ and the downloading set of instructions, have yet to be concluded. Such items have been receiving frequent upgrading. The next stage will be the usage of the EquiText in a Specialization Course via Web, organized by the Information Technology and Education Program staff. This will be another opportunity for the evaluation of this tool.

According to the philosophy of free distribution for using the EquiText, any school or organization interested in this tool, can contact this team through the addresses displayed in the function "Authorship". We expect that the site has all the instructions to "Download " the EquiText, and the function "Authorship" will be on line by the time this article is published.

The EquiText, a supporting tool in the construction of texts, in a cooperative way, was successfully used for the first time in Brazil during the second fortnight of January, 2000. In the university extension course on "Tools and Techniques of Groupware ", a project created, developed and executed by a group of students of the Post Graduate Program in Information Technology and Education (PPGIE), of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

The Extension Course took place during the TeleEducation Laboratory Course, under the coordination of Prof. Dr. Liane Margarida Rockenbach Tarouco. It has been fundamentally designed and meant for educators in the qualification process for the distance learning teaching, who will be using the new multimedia technologies available in the Internet in their daily pedagogical activities.

This Groupware course aimed at creating an educational environment for educators in teaching distance learning, which provided the production of works in an interactive, collaborative and cooperative way. Also, to elicit a new team work approach, either synchronous or asynchronously. To enhance the usage, the analysis and the evaluation of the educational technologies towards the cooperative works at distance. In addition to that to qualify educators to be able to relate groupware tools and their usage potentialities and to use them appropriately for building up new educational settings, with motivation and creativity in a cooperative way.

Given its interactive nature, the EquiText provided to the participants of the Course the opportunity to build up texts in teams, thus achieving the purposes aimed at this learning how to write collaboratively tool. From that experience, it could be seen that the EquiText, in its first version, turned to be an important and necessary means of contribution to our efforts in providing either for students, educators, or the Post-Graduate students themselves - creators of the tool - the opportunity to create and develop an interactive, creative and above all a cooperative work via the WEB.

Great part of the success of this tool has been due to the team spirit present amongst their authors whose origin are as vast and varied as their willpower and abilities to build up new knowledge. They come from different areas of the academic world: Pharmacy, Languages, Information Technology, Pedagogy, among others. As a matter of fact their different professional backgrounds enhance the interdisciplinary atmosphere of the Post Graduate Program of Information Technology and Education consolidating its aims and scientific work.

The EquiText stood out in the Course of Groupware Tools and Techniques at the PPGIE/UFRGS and in a scientific event abroad. By the impressions of the participants of the Groupware Course we could foresee new horizons of application of this tool in the educational field.

In the local level, with regional and national repercussion, several of the participants of the PPGIE have already started to project the use of the EquiText as an integrative part of their master's degree as well as in doctorate projects, such as: in a project of reading and writing English as a second language for academic purposes via the Internet; in a program of adults’ literacy; in social services programs to support chronic patients; in teaching programs in distance learning; in programs of training pre-service teachers for the new computerized technologies and so many others of social and pedagogic relevance, may be some concrete examples.

In the international level, the EquiText was presented in its first version during the 11th International Conference, SITE 2000, promoted by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education and for the Society for the Information Technology & Teacher Education, in San Diego, California, United States, on February 09, 2000. It received special attention from an interested audience especially because of its collaborative, interactive, democratic and free nature open to the negotiating character of a team work in the Web.

As a matter of fact, due to the interactive character of the EquiText and facilitator nature of text production in a collaborative way it enhances new scientific studies, seeking for the its necessary improvement. New uses and applications to the EquiText shall pop up as new research proposals to put some more light in the academic horizon.

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Freire, Paulo. (1996). Pedagogia da Autonomia. São Paulo, SP: o Paz e Terra.

Oliveira, Z. e Davis, C. (1993) Psicologia na Educação. São Paulo, Cortez.

VYGOTSKY, L.S. (1993). Obras Escogidas v. II. Madrid. Viseira.