Collaborative Writing in the Classroom

In this chapter, we focus on the affordances and limitations of the digital tool Google Documents, or Google Docs, used as a collaborative writing platform to complement students’ discussion processes, and to document these discussions’ progress in a law classroom setting. To enculturate global citizenship and develop students’ 21st-century skills, a final year undergraduate law course at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Internet and the Law, incorporated the use of digital tools to conduct class discussions among a multinational local and nonlocal cohort with a foreign course instructor. The culturally diverse background of both the instructor and the student body required and facilitated a carefully planned course curriculum with particular regard to teaching and learning activities that could foster cultural awareness and interculturality. According to Carroll (2015), a course curriculum that facilitates the growth of interculturality needs to take into account “various contextual factors . . . when planning, teaching and assessing its development” (p. 79). We did this in this course through using Google Docs and our assessment of its success with the class. Five class discussion sessions were conducted with the law students present in a physical setting, sitting in groups of four or five with their laptops and working from questions in shared Google Docs set up by the course instructor.