Page developed by  Merrolee Penman & Anita Hamilton

Collaborative writing tools can be used by one or more people in real-time or asynchronously.  A number of collaborative writing tools exist such as Zoho Writer and Google Documents and being web-based with each document having its own unique URL, groups of people can work on a document, spreadsheet or presentation, overcoming the need to keep track of different versions.  Once completed the final version can be uploaded back to the relevant program.  These tools are appealing to healthcare workers as they can be used to organize meetings, take notes, or to create joint documents, enabling us to work smarter and more efficiently.

Credibility of information in a collaborative document lies with the authors, who are known to each other. Reliability of the collaborative writing tools can be a concern if the company running the program decides to remove it from the Internet.  Users of collaborative writing tools are recommended to back up their work to a reliable place such as their own hard-drive, a pen-drive or an external hard-drive. Users should also be aware that computer hackers may access their documents, just as they do hard-drives of computers. Therefore, while the companies developing the software confidently assure the user of privacy, therefore you need to consider the type of information you store in collaborative programs and always pay careful attention to privacy.

Using Google Documents

Collaborative Writing by OT4OT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License.