VisciPad: Peeking into a Collaborative Creative Writing Project in Elementary School

We describe an experimental setting of creative collaborative writing in an elementary school in Finland, among a group of 5th and 6th graders. They were provided with small portable computers ("netbooks") and ubiquitous access through WLAN and 3G to a collaborative writing service based on Ether Pad. The computers and service were used for three months to produce manuscripts for a musical. Our work is an exploratory characterization of the usage patterns and customs that emerged, as they can be detected post hoc from the automatically revisioned writings and online discussions.