Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

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

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.

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.

Continue reading Collaboration in Cyberspace / Day 6 – Engage another Commenter in Discussion…

Debating / Day 5 Comment on a Blog Post You Don’t Agree With

Day 5 of the 31 day challenge is to stir up some debate, or at least comment on a blog post you don’t agree with.

The purpose of this activity to think about how to disagree and possibly create a debate within a blog.

I realized that have already been moderating a debate for a couple of months on Squidoo.

Squidoo Debates – Hey MonkeyBrain

I am one of the Giant Squids on Squidoo, a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a webpages (or lens) quickly on a topic he or she is passionate about or knows a lot about.

The HeyMonkeyBrain.com part of Squidoo allows lensmasters to a debate lens about anything topic you want people to talk about and then be the ringleader.

I created one of the early debate lenses looking at two related topics, Obama or Clinton – Who will be the Dems Nominee? Together – An Awesome Democratic Ticket? Monitoring the debate that has raged on this lens for the past two months has been quite an experience in diplomacy.

HeyMonkeyBrain.com could be used by educators a way of starting an online debate for students. Any lens that would be created would, however be available to the public and could receive public comments. I don’t believe anyone is using HeyMonkeyBrain.com yet for an educational debate. Many of the debate topics are on amusing topics. You can see the list of top debates at Top 50 Debates.

Continue reading Debating / Day 5 Comment on a Blog Post You Don’t Agree With…