RESEARCH ON PROXIMITY CHOICES FOR DISTRIBUTED,ASYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATIVE WRITING GROUPS

摘要

This paper investigates whether using variations in proximity choices can improve outcomes of distributed,rnasynchronous collaborative writing (CW) teams that work on the Internet. This paper reports preliminaryrnresults of a field experiment on asynchronous collaborative writing using 550 participants over a month andrna half. It is found that groups that met face-to-face for convergence processes had no advantages over groupsrnthat did all their work asynchronously and distributed. This supports the notion that with correct processesrnand tools, distributed groups can be just as effective as face-to-face groups.