Collaboration in Cyberspace / Day 6 – Engage another Commenter in Discussion

May 6, 2008 at 2:28 pm | In 31 Day Comment Challenge, Distance Education, Education 2.0, Educators Online, Graduate, Grief and Loss, Resources, comment08, online education | 5 Comments
Tags: 31 day challenge, blog posts, collaboration, collaborative efforts, comment08, cyberspace, graduate students, Grief and Loss, wikis, wikis in education

A blog posting by Betty Gilgoff on Betty’s Blog about Collaboration got me thinking about how things have changed since I was in a student in college and in medical school. These days there is much more of a push, especially in the online arena to have students collaborate on project particularly in cyberspace.

Raising Hands This image summarizes my prior conception on collaboration. I had a lot of difficulties in my online teaching training with the collaborative efforts. I found it way too easy for those who weren’t willing to work on group projects to ride along on the coattails of those who were and get a decent grade without doing much.

I shared my thoughts with Betty:

I haven’t incorporated many collaborative efforts into my teaching because I am still trying to find a way to have efforts equitably distributed or be able to account for each person’s contribution. I did end up developing a way of capturing everyone’s contribution on a group project using a form to create a composite group paper.

For this 2005 teaching course that I was taking, I used a form builder to capture information for all of the participants in my teaching group as a way of demonstrating who had contribute what and creating a way to collaborate in fairness.

If I were to do the project again today, I would use a wiki, which would do exactly the same thing. Unfortunately wikis were not as prominent or available in 2005 when I took the course.

Collaborative Efforts for Graduate Course

With my graduate course this past semester, I had the students all contribute resources to a wiki. I used PBwiki to create a collaborative group where each student would be able to contribute additional weekly resources and readings as a group effort.

With a wiki, it is very easy to see which student (or collaborator) has contributed what to the assignment or the project.

Day 6: Engage another Commenter in Discussion

The task for today was to engage another commenter in conversation.

I hasn’t realized the netiquette for responding to another commenter. The convention is apparently to address your post “@blog commenter” (inserting the person’s name where I’ve referred to “blog commenter”) so the commenter knows you’re referring to him/her.

I did end up posting a comment for one of the posters to a blog post that I’ve followed from the beginning and had a response back.

Accomplishments Day 6

1. Posting a comment on another person’s blog – looking a collaboration.

2. Following up on the Day 5 comment to stir up some controversy.

3. Ruminating about Collaboration in Cyberspace.

4. Starting Education 2.0 Resource Page.

5. Writing and *finally* Posting Day 6 Comment.

Reflections on Day 6

I discovered proper blog commenting etiquette or netiquette and had a response to my comment. The ‘controversial’ post from yesterday didn’t end up being that controversial. I am having fun meeting other edubloggers in this process.

Revelations: The revelations for today were more about the Collaboration in Cyberspace than about the Blog Challenge, although wouldn’t have happened without the blog challenge.

I realize that did I manage to get over my reluctance of doing collaborative projects by having my students work on together on a collaborative group resource list using a wiki. By figuring out a way to track involvement, I was able to find a way to measure input and make the project fairer in my opinion.

Image: Modified Microsoft Image.

This blog post is part of The Comment Challenge, comment08.

5 Comments

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I would have loved doing my collaborative work in grad school on a wiki. It was very annoying to be the one who carried others to good grades!

Christine Martell — May 8, 2008 #
Christine

Thanks for the comments.

I got pretty frustrated working on several collaborative efforts and carrying others, who felt their lives were busier than the rest of us to be able to contribute much.

The saddest part for me was that my fellow students at the time were also other instructors learning to be certified in online teaching.

drdyer — May 9, 2008 #
Hi Kirsti,

WOW I’m glad after reading your post that I did respond back to your comment (would have felt bad otherwise).

People have differing opinions on whether bloggers should respond back to their commenters in comments on their posts however my belief is whenever possible you should always try. I don’t promise that I’m always prompt at responding but I do try hard to. This is so much about etiquette but about community building and interacting with your readers.

I haven’t decided about which looks nicer @bloggername or the bloggers name with comma. Since twitter lots of people are using @.

Sue Waters — May 9, 2008 #
Christine, another way of having students collaborate is with google docs. It also tracks history of participation but is more similar to a word document and less public than a wiki. I use it sometimes with my colleagues and have used it with grade 4/5 students. The most effective use though that I’ve seen is the way that my son uses it with other students in some of his university classes. Have you used it or found it useful?

bgilgoff — May 9, 2008 #
Wikis are a great tool, coming from a business setting I’ll just point out that when students get comfortable using Wikis, they’re learning real skills for working in the private sector. Wikis are the perfect collaboration tool for geographically dispersed teams in companies. A lot of expensive air travel can be replaced by single Wiki page.

Cole Thompson — May 9, 2008 #