The Role of ICT in Scaffolding Collaborative Writing

Abstract

Collaborative writing is an increasingly popular practice in today’s classrooms due to the benefits of social constructivism, which is the theoretical basis of the activity. Ideally, students’ writing skills grow when they scaffold on each other’s strengths and produce a collaborated piece of writing together. However, some students take this opportunity to “free-ride” so work is not done fairly. Due to culture or individual personality, some domineering students decide to finish most parts of the work, leaving very little to the passive ones. Students dividing sections of the essays for team members to work on also discourage collaborative discussions and make the work non-coherent. This paper offers an alternative to handling these issues by using Information Communicative Technology (ICT) as a scaffold to foster individual accountability and positive interdependence, for monitoring and assessment needs and as a platform for revising writings collaboratively.