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Getting students and colleagues to work together over the network

Collaboration has for centuries been an important part of teaching and research. Through meetings, discussions, correspondence, and the sharing of papers we have wrestled with essential ideas and worked together to solve problems. But the last decade has witnessed the invention of new tools for collaboration, based on personal computers and the web of networks that connect them around the globe. Researchers, students, and professionals in the world of work have quickly changed their patterns of communication to take advantage of these digital collaboration tools.

This session introduces you to the basic concepts of digital collaboration and provides you with a hands-on, on-line collaborative experience. By the end of the seminar you will have designed a collaborative e assignment for one of your own courses.

Objectives
By the conclusion of this session, you will:

Be aware of how digital collaboration tools have become part of college life.
Understand the values of digital collaboration tools for teaching and learning.
Learn to use basic digital collaboration tools such as iChat.
Plan and build a collaborative assignment for one of your courses.

Digital Collaboration in Practice

We begin this seminar with some background readings and interviews to familiarize you with the ways that students and faculty are using digital collaboration tools in their lives and work, as well as some thinking and planning for how these tools might be applied in your own teaching.

Readings
Choose any three of the following readings:

The process of writing on campus is changing as it takes advantage of the capabilities of networked computers and sharing software, as summarized in Seven Things You Should Know About Collaborative Editing, from Educause.
The rest of the world is taking full advantage of the collaborative possibilities offered by an Internet that respects few international boundaries. The article Global Connections, from the Teaching with Technology series at PowerToLearn, describes what’s happening right now.
An article from the New York Times, I.M. Generation Is Changing the Way Business Talks, provides an interesting overview of how digital collaboration tools are being used in business.
By adding sight and sound to Instant Messaging we can create a videoconference, much used these days in the corporate world, as explained in Telepresence TV from the New York Times.
Collaboration provides a practical example of how digital collaboration tools might be used in the context of a college course, as well as an overview of various methods for including collaborative applications in current courses.
Educational Messaging describes the distractions of instant messaging in the lecture hall, and offers some practical ways to take advantage of it.
85% of College Students Use Facebook, claims Michael Arrington in this informative blog posting that provides a good description of this current phenomenon of digital collaboration on campus.
Wikis in the Classroom describes one faculty member's success with this new form of collaboration. A wiki is a web site built with the contributions of its members. (A wiki server is being built into Leopard, Apple's next version of the OS X server.)
The Power of Wikis in Higher Education, an interview with a leading user of Wikis for learning.

Writing Together

When we write, we create ideas. Good writing demands first thorough thinking, then careful construction of verbs, nouns and modifiers. Successful writing demands consideration of the audience and logical planning of the narrative. It's hard to write prose that reads easily. How can computers and networks help or students to write? And help us to teach them and coach them in their writing?

This section of the seminar offers a mundane yet effective technique that involves writing with collaborators.

Online Comments with Word

Teachers of all subjects at all levels assign papers to their students. The students write them, then turn them in (on paper) to the teacher, who corrects them. Correcting papers, for many a teacher or professor, is a common way to pass the time in the evenings. You can tell which ones are the teachers in the subway on the way home -- they carry sheaves of stapled papers from their students, to be corrected that evening and handed back the next day.

But then one day I spied my English-teacher colleague leaving his office at 4 PM, carrying only a thin briefcase. "No papers to grade?" I asked. "Plenty," he replied. "They're all in here, sixty of them." Proudly he patted his petite briefcase. "On my laptop."

He explained how his students send him their papers as Word files, some through email, some through his drop-box on Blackboard, a few via USB memory-stick. He organizes them into folders, one for each section of his writing course. Submissions on paper are not allowed.

When he gets home, he opens the papers one at a time and reads them right on the computer display. When he catches a crafty construction, or perceives a passive voice, or locates a lapse in logic, he chooses Insert --> Comment from the menubar. This opens a little window at the bottom of the page where he types in his advice. The conclusion you have drawn in this last sentence seems not to find evidence or support in any of the writing that preceded it. For example.

He has found that he can type these comments about three times faster than he can write them with a pen on paper. So his comments tend to be longer and more complete, and his students say, more useful. They are also easier to read. He reports that he can correct 60 papers in this online fashion in less time with better quality than he used to do on paper. Without coffee-stains.

When the student gets the paper back -- which happens that same evening, through the network, by email or drop box -- he or she sees the comments interspersed as little yellow tags throughout the text. Clicking on a tag opens the comments window where the teacher's notations can be read. (I hope you caught that passive voice. If you were my English teacher, I'd expect you to insert a comment on that last sentence.)

In the last assignment in the English class, he asked the students to read and comments on each others' papers (online of course), and gave them an opportunity to revise them before final submission. He says the results showed higher quality writing. Many of the students passed the Word documents back and forth over the network using the Instant Messenger systems that they use everyday for peer-to-peer communication.

For more ideas on this type of online correction of papers, see the article Correcting Papers.

Your task in this seminar is to write or paste a short piece of prose into Word. Then send it to another participant for commentary, as described above. Get your work reviewed by at least two others in the group. At the same time, read and comment on the work of two of your colleagues.

In this session, you will set up iChat, use it in a collaborative exercise with your fellow faculty members, and then engage in a discussion of the educational possibilities of digital collaborative tools.

Connect
If you haven’t already, get yourself an instant messaging account, and fire up iChat. Here’s how:

1. Get an instant messaging account. To participate in this seminar, you will need one or the other of these types of accounts:

Whenever this colleague is online, you will see his or her name in your Buddy List, making it easy to collaborate.

With your Buddy List full of names, you are ready to participate in a collaborative exercise.

Your assignment

Before the break, you and several colleagues were volunteered to serve on the curriculum committee for the new Freshman Great Ideas course. This three-credit course will be required of all freshmen beginning next year, with the intent of providing an introduction to the most important concepts from all academic fields.

Your committee’s report is due to be presented at tomorrow’s faculty meeting. Unfortunately, the committee failed to meet before or during the break. You must therefore collaborate online today to discuss the topic and compose your recommendations. Your task is to come up with an outline of this course, which will meet twice a week for 15 weeks.

A ground rule of this exercise is that you must use iChat for all of your communication – no talking in this class! Imagine that you and your colleagues are all working from home during the break, and cannot meet together in one place. In the seminar, you will have five minutes to plan a collaboration strategy together face-to-face, but after that the rules apply. You may conduct your business as you wish, but the following advice may help you:

Demonstration
In this part of the seminar, you will see demonstrations of some additional tools for digital collaboration, including:

Two colleagues in the sciences sought to submit a joint paper for presentation at a conference with two other researchers at a school on the other side of the country . They had circulated their first drafts as Word documents, and commented back and forth as described above. But now the deadline was at hand, so they had to agree on the exact working of the final submission. So they all arranged to get online at a time certain and work on the paper together.

Using GoogleDocs, one of the group opened the paper on his computer, and then opened it up to the others to join. Soon all four of them were looking at the same paper on their screens. At the same time they opened an audio chat using instant messaging software, so they could all hear each other. "I think we need to change the title to better reflect our conclusions," said one of the authors as he deleted the phrase is associated with and substituted the word causes in the title. The other three authors saw his changes show up in green text. (Green was his color for the day. Each author's changes showed up in a different color.)

Their synchronous editing session lasted just over an hour. At the end, the shared document was sprinkled with green, blue, red, and yellow changes. Author #1 (the one who started it all) saved the changes, submitted the paper, and all waited for the committee's response...

You can learn more about GoogleDocs at the Google web site. This is the software that enabled the shared peer-to-peer editing. For the accompanying audio chat, you might take a look at iChat, Skype, or AIM, all of which can handle this aspect of the session.

Set up a GoogleDocs document, and invite the others in the seminar to share it. Let one participant start the editing session by opening a new document and pasting in some text. (You may use the text below, lyrics to the song Online QuickTime Internet Podcast Blues, which needs considerable editing and enhancement.)

Each author shows up in a different color. Your collaborative task is to edit the document until all are satisfied with its content and style. (Improvements to the lyrics may be forwarded to jim@lengel.net)

Design a Collaborative Assignment
To apply what you have learned in this seminar, you will design an assignment for one of your current courses, in which students will use one or more digital collaboration tools. As you design this assignment, read the background paper Collaboration for some basic ideas.