Graduate | Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

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.

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