Using SubEthaEdit Collaborative Writing Software SubEthaEdit is a software package that allows students to work together on a single text document from separate computers using the local network. Students ‘join’ documents and make changes in real-time using different colors to differentiate their work from the work of other members of the group. Getting Started | Setting up Groups | Working With Text Saving your Work | Tips for Classroom Use | FAQ

Getting Started

• Start SubEthaEdit by going into Macintosh HD / Applications and double-clicking on the SubEthaEdit icon. When the program has started up, you must first give yourself a user name. You can do this by clicking on the SubEthaEdit menu at the top left corner of the screen and choosing Preferences.
• The preferences window (see figure at right) will appear. In the Name field enter your full name (this is what will identify you from everybody else logged in to the program). You can also enter your e-mail and choose a color for yourself. This color will highlight all of your text in any documents you work on and will differentiate your work from that of other people working on the same document.

Setting Up Groups

• Once everybody in the class has opened SubEthaEdit, go to the Window menu at the top of the screen and choose Rendezvous. Through the rendezvous window you can see everybody who currently has SubEthaEdit open. You’ll see their name, their color, and any documents they are hosting.
• Inviting People: To put groups together, first choose group leaders who will be responsible for inviting other people to join their document. The group leader clicks on Participants at the top left corner of the main text editor window. A panel slides out to the right showing who is taking part in the document.

Next the group leader clicks on a person in the rendezvous window and drags them into the participants panel in their document. They can drag them into the Read section (meaning the person will only be able to watch and not actually type in text themselves.) or they can drag them into the Read / Write section which means the participant can actually add text to the document.

When the group leader drags a person into his / her document the person is given a message inviting them to join and they must choose Accept in order to be added to the participant list. In this way the leader can keep dragging new people into the participant list until a group is complete. A new text window will pop open on the invitee’s desktop once they have accepted an invitation and it is in this window that participants edit text.

If the leader for some reason wishes to get rid of a participant, he / she can click once on the participant, click on the arrow next to the cogwheel at the bottom left corner of the participants window, and choose Kick. This will remove a person from the list and notify them that they have been removed from the document. If a person is done working on a document they can also just exit SubEthaEdit and they will automatically disappear from any documents they were participating in.

Working with Text

• Once a group has been created, working with text is relatively easy. Participants can type their text into the text editor simultaneously, with text appearing in the color of the participant who wrote it.
• Participants can modify the font, size, and style of the text they are working with. You can access these options by going to the Format menu at the top of the screen then choosing Font from the drop-down menu. You can also make line numbers appear next to each line by going to the View menu and choosing Show Line Numbers, a function that can be helpful with very long documents.

Saving Your Work

• When a project is complete, anybody can save the document to their computer. You can save documents in two different formats: as simple text files or as HTML webpages. Simple text files preserve no formatting and retain no colors (meaning that it is impossible to tell who has written which piece of text in the document.) Saving as HTML creates a webpage that shows a list of all members of the document including their information (name, color, e-mail) and also the original text, including colored highlighting.
• To save as a simple text file, go to the File menu and choose Save As, then select where you would like to save the document. To save as HTML, go to the File menu and choose Export, then modify any of the options in the window that appears and press OK. The document will be saved as an html file along with a folder called images. This folder holds the little images that appear next to your name (like the lightning in the screenshots above). This folder isn’t essential and can be deleted without any harm to the main document. Don’t forget: if you only export your document to HTML you will not be able to open the file in SubEthaEdit anymore!

Tips for Classroom Use

• Making Groups: In a classroom setting, the greatest difficulty with SubEthaEdit will be setting up appropriate groups while avoiding confusion. One good method of doing this is if the teacher arrives early to the lab and creates as many documents as there are groups. When all the students have signed on the teacher can assign groups by dragging and dropping the class into different documents. This way the teacher has control over who is in the group and can watch work in all of the documents on his / her own computer. Since only the master of a document (i.e. the one who started it by inviting people to join) can invite people to join the group, the students can’t invite each other into groups they are not supposed to be in because the teacher is the document master. When the exercise is done, the teacher can ask each group to designate a leader who is responsible for saving the document to the class’ COLLAB folder or he / she can save each group’s work on his / her own.
• Creating Random Groups: When everybody opens SubEthaEdit they are automatically given the name ‘Lab User’ (which is why it is so important to change your user name when you log on). The teacher can take advantage of this by having students enter aliases or simply bogus names. He / she can then drag and drop unknown students randomly into documents and have them work on a piece together. None of the students will know who they are working with until the class is over. This could lead to some interesting opportunities for creative writing!

FAQ

Can I add images to a document?

Because SubEthaEdit uses a basic text editor there is currently no way for participants to import images into their work.

What kinds of documents can I open in SubEthaEdit?

You can only open basic text documents, such as those created when you save a document from SubEthaEdit. These text files don’t retain the colors that connect each piece of text to a contributor so there is no way of importing this color back in SubEthaEdit once a document has been saved and the program has been quit.

Can two students collaborate on a piece from different dorms?

Only people on the same subnet will appear in the SubEthaEdit rendezvous window. Currently, it is possible for students in different locations on campus to collaborate on the same document. However, this may no longer be possible with future network configurations and upgrades.

How do I know who is the master of a document?

At the top of the text editor window you should see the name of the file you are working on and to the right of that should be the user name of the person who created the document and invited you to join it.