Digital Documenting Practices: Collaborative Writing in Workplace Training

Abstract

The present article examines collaborative writing in organizational consulting and training, where writing takes place as part of a group discussion assignment and is carried out by using digital writing technologies. In the training, the groups use digital tablets as their writing device in order to document their answers in the shared digital platform. Using multimodal conversation analysis as a method, the article illustrates the way writing is interactionally accomplished in this setting where digital writing intertwines with face-to-face interaction as the groups jointly formulate a documentable written entry for specific institutional purposes. The results show how writing is managed in situated ways and organized by three specific aspects: access, publicity, and broader organizational practice. The article advances prior understanding of the embodied nature of writing and writing with technologies by demonstrating how the body and the material and social nature of writing technologies intertwine within situated social interaction.

On the Page and Off the Page: Adolescents’ Collaborative Writing in an After-School Spoken-Word Poetry Team

“…We know that writing is not an isolated, individual, or brain-bound activity; many scholars have illustrated the importance of social context, tools, and bodies in the act of writing (Doody & Artemeva, 2022;Stornaiuolo & Monea, 2023;Wilder, 2021). In adult and professional writing life, much of what writers create is collaboratively authored (Nissi & Lehtinen, 2022). Yet, these kinds of writing practices are not typically taught or evaluated in K-12 schools (Krishnan et al, 2019), where the individual writer tends to be the point of evaluation and analysis.…”

Balancing participation in writing meeting minutes online in video-mediated return-to-work negotiations

“…Particularly when it comes to the writing tasks in institutional settings, the "appropriateness" of the texts in terms of their institutional or organizational purpose becomes a general and joint concern of the participants. This necessitates that participants agree upon the text as a product including exact wordings as well as the decisions that the written text carries (see Magnusson, 2021;Nissi and Lehtinen, 2022). Nissi and Lehtinen (2022) use the term documentability to describe the process that transforms the content of the discussion into a written, publicly available form.…”

“…This necessitates that participants agree upon the text as a product including exact wordings as well as the decisions that the written text carries (see Magnusson, 2021;Nissi and Lehtinen, 2022). Nissi and Lehtinen (2022) use the term documentability to describe the process that transforms the content of the discussion into a written, publicly available form. Documentability is a feature of all kinds of institutionally foregrounded texts, including the digital ones.…”

“…Documentability is a feature of all kinds of institutionally foregrounded texts, including the digital ones. By orienting to documentability, the participants consider the institutional purposes of the written document, which may be consequential for the participants after the writing process (Nissi and Lehtinen, 2022).…”

“…In sum, video-mediated interaction brings both specific affordances and constrains to writing as a social practice, as the accessibility of the text under construction is shaped by the properties and resources of the technology being used (Nissi and Lehtinen, 2022). Further, participants' different opportunities and rights to contribute to the production of the text are given in situ and shaped by the institutional setting and the division of the meeting roles (Mondada and Svinhufvud, 2016;Balaman, 2021;Nissi and Lehtinen, 2022). We focus on this organization by examining how meeting memos are constructed in video-mediated RTW negotiations by inviting, receipting, and jointly formulating participants' views both verbally and writing.…”