Wisconsin Union Blend

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

I saw a post on this in the Chronicle’s Wired Campus this morning and thought I would add a blurb on it to the WUB. Love the acronym! The wiki is at http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/. Here’s the description:

“This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.”

T&LS on Union Blend - Notes from the 2008 Teaching and Learning Symposium

Today’s panel session on Facilitating Collaborative and Group Projects wrapped up with a series of quick, two sentence tips from each of the panelists on facilitating collaborative work. Here are my notes on their rapidly delivered good advice:

• be explicit about the role of collaboration in your course
• be ready for your students to be even more diverse than you might think them to be at first
• find creative strategies to maintain independent accountability
• create collaborative exercises that are authentic to the discipline
• collaborative tasks must be challening enough to merit a collaborative effort (in other words, there needs to be a real reason for students to collaborate
• involve students in the development of the strategies, guidelines, and expectations around group work
• collect data from your students on what’s working and what’s not working
• make collaboration a primary and explicit goal of the course
• create the spaces for collaboration to happen - both the tools and the physical space
• assess students, through peer and self evaluation, on their collaborative process
• in addition to teaching students the discipline, train them on collaboration

Being open and direct with students about the goals of group collaboration was an important thread throughout the session. The panelists also stressed the importance of making self and peer assessments of the collaborative process itself an integral part of the project design.

Here are a few other key points from the session that stood out for me:

John Wright, Department of Chemistry, stressed the role student collaboration plays in helping students build the confidence they need to think about problems on their own. Wright explained that when students work collaboratively, their language around problem solving changes, and their confidence improves.

Rania Huntington, visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Literature, and Sara Miller, from CALS, both emphasized how collaborative work can help put students in charge of their own learning. Huntington said that for her Garden of Searching for Dreams project, students “were the ones asking and answering questions.” Following on the thread, Miller explained that in her projects, students “are designing the day’s learning” and in doing so “they really test their own understanding.”

Constance Steinkuehler from the Department of Education spoke about how collaborative and collective learning happens in early education, and then again in graduate school, but often not enough in between. Steinkuehler pointed out that this gap is particularly problematic, given that “collaborative and collective work is such a big part of what we do in society.”

Steinkuehler went on to talk about how in online gaming environments, or “playspace’s” it is “prestigious to contribute to the collective intelligence.” So, too when tackling collaborative tasks. I like the idea of thinking about collaborative learning environments, like our Collaborative Sites, as intellectual “playspaces.”

If you attended the session - what were your take-aways? If not, what are your tips for effective design of collaborative learning tasks? Let us know in the comments!

I’ll be presenting today as a part of the Community of Educational Technology Support (ComETS) event -Emerging Trends and Cool Class Cases.

I’ll give a quick overview of how we’re using the open source content management system Drupal for a variety of teaching and learning solutions, from media rich collaborative environments, to course portfolios, easy to update department web sites, and, of course, LessonShare, our social repository for lesson plans and teaching materials.

If you attended the presentation, please let me know what you think in the comments!

Here are the slides (pdf).

If you’ve been bit by the blog-reading bug, you know that you can very quickly fill up your RSS reader with way too many subscriptions. Fortunately, most of the time, you don’t have to read and respond to each and every post. It is easy enough to skim through collections of posts, looking for those that are most relevant. And of course, there is the wonderful “Mark all as Read” button, a feature in most RSS readers, which instantly relieves the guilt of falling 3 or 30 or 300 posts behind on your reading.

But what happens when blogging and commenting on other students blog posts, becomes a central part of a course? With 20 or more students each writing one or more posts a week, just keeping up with the blog can quickly become a significant part of the weekly workload - for both the students and the instructor. Can students and teachers get away with hitting the “Mark all as read” button?

This is one of the challenges that has come up in a class I’m helping out with this semester that has turned a long-standing paper portfolio project into an online portfolio incorporating both blog-like and wiki-like interaction. When asked to give feedback on the project, nearly all of the students wrote that they like how the online portfolio gives them the opportunity to post their ideas, reflect on their readings, and continue class discussions outside of class. There was wide-spread agreement that the portfolio was an integral and useful part of the class. But when asked what could be improved, several of the students mentioned having difficulty keeping up on what their peers are writing. A few said that it was hard to sift through the many posts to find those that are most relevant each week.

We initially thought that “tagging” would be a solution to the latter problem, but so far it seems that the students don’t really use the tags to navigate the site. We added a “Top Tags this Week” block to the main page, to help students keep track of the topics that are receiving the most attention in class. We also switched over to a short abstract for each post on the front page, so that students didn’t feel as if they have to read every word of every post. This helped a bit, but students still noted that they were sometimes overwhelmed by all of the posts. And so, we’ve come up with a dashboard view, that allows students to quickly choose what they want to read based on the authors and titles of each post.

In addition to improving the layout and design of the site, we’re also thinking about how to frame student expectations. One initial hope for this project was that it would take the individual and potentially lonely act of producing a portfolio and make it social and interactive. Students can click on the “My Contributions” page to see their own evolving portfolio, or they can dive into the river of news, or the tags, to explore the work of their peers. Unlike the paper-based portfolio project, we wanted students be able to benefit from and build upon the work of their peers. This is certainly happening - students are starting to reference each others posts, and are occasionally extending upon their peers’ post ideas and formats. But the process of selecting, reading, and reacting to the work of their peers remains challenging.

And so, I’m asking for your help. If you were tasked to create an introductory guide to course blogging, what advice would you give to help frame students expectations? How would you help them deal with the inevitably overwhelming flood of information? What other advice would you give to make sure students time and energy was put to best use in these environments?

I’ll put a few of my initial ideas into the comments, but I’m most looking forward to seeing what you have to say!

Tucked away in the corner of a Thursday evening poster session was my pick for Educause 2007’s coolest session of the week, Lafayette College’s use of the content management system Drupal for:

two highly flexible and distinctly different online spaces: a departmental Web site full of easily edited and highly searchable documentation, current news, and dynamic RSS feeds, and a campus-wide community space where blogging, photo sharing, podcasting, and class discussions coexist.

Very cool! The poster, From Blogs to Brawn: Deploying Flexible Web Applications, was presented by Courtney Bentley, Instructional Technology Program Coordinator at Lafayette College.

The community space side of the equation, which Lafayette calls Soapbox 2.0, puts Drupal’s blogging, polling, and photosharing modules to work for students, faculty, and staff. Their use of the Organic Groups module makes it easy for any registered user to create a group, whether it be for a student initiated class study group, an instructor led class blog, a student sporting group, or an administrative unit looking for collaborative project space.

This flexible, user driven collaborative space is a great model to follow as we look to building our own collaborative spaces.

To get a sense of how it is working at Lafayette, be sure to check out their Hall of Fame page with stats on the Soapbox’s first year: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/hof/

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Wikipedia is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation; the corpus grows not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation. (Many to Many)

As hinted in a previous post on differences between wikis and blogs, wikis aren’t always used for collaborative writing. And, as the quote above reminds us, “collaboration” might not be cooperative collaboration in every wiki project.

The various ways in which “collaboration” works (or doesn’t), in different wiki projects is possible because wikis are so inherently flexible, and so initially blank, that creative folks come up with an endless supply of new ideas on how to put them to use. Even with the wide range of potential applications, most academic wiki projects seem to fall somewhere on a spectrum between two approaches to wiki collaboration:

the compilation approach: multiple authors contribute their part to a growing collection of knowledge
the consensus approach: authors work together (or perhaps against each other) to write an evolving document that reflects the perspectives of multiple contributors

The compilation approach (aka the knowledge base)

The majority of academic wiki projects I’ve seen use wikis primarily as an efficient way for a group of people to pool knowledge. Each author adds their 2 cents to the wiki, and, as a reward, benefits from the contributions of the group as a whole. In these projects, the tendency is to not edit the work of others.

An interdisciplinary project at UW-Parkside, created by Wendy Leeds Hurwitz and Shi Hae Kim is a good example:

At UW-Parkside in fall 2006, COMM 310: Communication in Everyday Life linked with TEDU 210: Teaching, Learning and Development. We put the students into groups across courses, and gave them a wiki designed to permit easy sharing of information. The Education students observed K-12 classrooms and posted fieldnotes to the wiki. The Communication students made videotapes of interaction in the same classrooms, and posted the videos, as well as transcriptions, to the wiki. All students were asked to read 10 sources and post their notes to the wiki. We created FAQ, a glossary of specialized vocabulary, and a “water cooler” where anyone could ask a question and anyone else could answer. Each student and group had their own pages, linked to those of others. Then each drew on the information collected in the wiki to write an individual paper (which was not posted to the wiki). - adapted from WiscWiki’s list of UW wiki projects

In this project, the wiki acts as an efficient clearinghouse for the data students are collecting on their classroom visits, rather than as a collaborative writing platform. Students read and draw on each others contributions, and work together to keep the resource organized, but don’t actually edit each others work.

The consensus approach

Less common, in the academic wiki projects I’ve seen, is to use the wiki as a central point for collaboration, argumentation, and consensus building.

One example is the Choose your Own Adventure mystery novel project from an intermediate French class at UW-Madison.

For this project, students worked together in groups to write a “Choose Your Own Adventure” mystery novel in French. Each group collaborated on a chapter of the story and decided on the choices the main character would make at the end of the chapter. Other groups joined in and wrote chapters corresponding to each choice. All in all, each class wrote a story with eight possible endings. - adapted from Wiki Ideas Galore!

Like many wiki projects, this one involves both the compilation and consensus approaches. The story as a whole is a compilation of the chapters submitted by each group. Each chapter is a result of collaboration and consensus among group members. (It is interesting to note however that this project was structured such that much of the consensus building and decision making happened verbally in class rather than on the wiki.)

How does your wiki work?

When I first got started working with wikis, I expected to see many more projects focused on argumentation, debate, and consensus building. I’ve been happy to see the many compilation oriented projects succeed, and it has been fascinating to see how powerful wikis can be for efficient information sharing.

But, I’m beginning to wonder - How well do wikis work for consensus oriented collaborative writing projects in academia? Are there models out there to follow? What makes these wiki projects work? Do wikis need a richer set of collaboration oriented features?

In the wikis learning circle at the recent Teaching and Learning Symposium, we had a short discussion on the similarities and differences between wikis, blogs, and discussion boards. A previous post tackled what I think is the easier part of the answer - What’s the difference between a wiki and a blog? Now for the tough part: How are blogs and discussion boards similar and different? And, more importantly, what sorts of instructional objectives might lead you to use one tool or the other?

Quick Definitions

A blog is a website made up of a series of “posts,” organized with the newest information at the top of the page (Hourihan). Blogs often allow your readers to submit comments on each post. Blogs also usually allow subscribtion (via RSS), making it easy for readers to keep up on the latest posts on their favorite blogs.

A discussion board (also known as a “forum”), is a collection of “threaded” discussions. Each discussion begins with a post, often in the form of a question or topic to ponder. Authors reply to the initial post, with each new post appearing below previous ones.

Similarities

Like wikis, both blogs and discussion boards make web publishing easy. They both provide a platform for students to express and defend their opinions and help provide an audience for student writing beyond the teacher of the course. Both blogs and discussion boards share a key difference with wikis, in that they place ownership of the text with individual authors, rather than the authoring community.

Differences

Author-Centered vs. Topic Centered

Blogs are, by nature, author centered. You might think of a blog as an evolving set of opinion statements, in which the author states a formative opinion, and then defends and refines that position as other authors react, both in comments attached to the original post, and on their own blogs.

Discussion boards, by contrast, place the topic or question at the center of the authoring environment. The initial post defines the scope of the thread, and authors “reply” with their take on the topic.

This distinction is easy to see when visiting blogs and discussion boards. On an individual blog you see the blog author’s posts first, followed by comments from readers. Discussion boards present topics first, regardless of author.

One result of this difference is that blogs are generally individually crafted environments. Bloggers are in control of the look and feel (or the visual “theme”) of their blog. Many blogs include links to the author’s favorite websites and other blogs they like to read. Some blogs include other personalized information as well, like photo galleries, facebook profiles, and the like. None of this customization exists in the typical discussion board.

Some educators interested in academic blogging have argued that the ability to craft a personal environment for their work leads students to a greater sense of ownership and investment. Rather than taking part in someone else’s discussion, bloggers work on their own turf.

Referencing

Tom Coates, on the blog plasticbag.org, argues that another key difference between discussion boards and blogs has to do with how authors reference each others work.

Discussion board conversations are called “threaded discussions” because each post is directly tied to the posts immediately before and after. Blog posts, by contrast, even when they reference other blog posts, appear in the author’s own blog, outside of the context of any ongoing discussion (it is up to the blogger to build the context of any previous discussion into their post). While this may at first seem like a disadvantage, Coates argues that this author controlled linking between blog posts actually helps filter out less important posts while highlighting the more insightful ones. Coates explains that on a discussion board, “if the second post is entirely off-topic or contains spurious information,” it nonetheless “remains very clearly in the context of the thread.” In this respect, discussion boards make it very difficult to tell which posts are most important or influential in an ongoing discussion.

In a blogging community, however, the more insightful posts tend to be mentioned and linked to more often than those with a lesser impact. Coates argues that, as a result, “those posts which are merely ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’ will be filtered from the public consciousness, even as they have fulfilled a valuable function in directing people towards the next structural post in their debate.” While at the same time, the increasing number of links to the more important, or in Coates words, “structural” posts make them easier for readers to find.

Media

I’m not sure why exactly, but discussion-boards tend to be primarily text-only environments. Blogs lean toward text, but also make incorporating audio, video, pictures, and animation quite easy.

Comments

In some ways, blogs have discussion boards built into them. This is because blog comments are organized and presented much like threaded posts on a discussion board. In this respect, writers in a blogging community can choose to make a comment when they have a quick response to a post, or post a more substantial response on their own blog with a link to the original post.

Blog or discussion board?

By placing the author at the center of the writing community, blogs offer rich opportunities for students to develop a personal voice, to initiate discussions, to reflect on their learning, and to write with or for an audience. Because bloggers are writing in their “own space” blogs might be more effective than discussion boards at encouraging personal expression.

Discussion boards might be preferable if it is important for class discussion to happen within a shared, neutral environment, if the goal is to have students react primarily to teacher generated posts, or if it is important for students to see every contribution to a discussion before responding.

Just a start

As I look this over, I feel I should have opened with a bit of a disclosure: A while back, well before I’d ever heard the word “blog,” I wrote a paper for one of my teacher education classes called, “Discussion Board, or Discussion Bored” outlining some lessons I’d learned about trying to use a discussion board to facilitate more and more thoughtful discussions in one of my classes. I was a very new teacher, and the project hadn’t quite worked out the way I would have liked. It is possible that I’ve never quite recovered from that experience, and that I’ve viewed discussion boards with some suspicion ever since. So, please, let me know your thoughts on this, particularly if it seems that I’ve been unfair to discussion boards!

See also

• 7 things you should know about blogs
• Tips and Strategies: Facilitating Online Discussions

Over the past couple of weeks, at the T&LS, at the TASI, and in consultations and conversations with faculty and staff around campus, people have been thinking and talking a lot about wikis and blogs, and wondering what these tools can do to support effective teaching and learning. In this post, I hope to pull together several discussions addressing the two most common questions people have been asking about wikis and blogs recently: What are they? And what’s the difference?

Quick definitions

A wiki is a website with an edit button on it (Frey). Most of the time, when you visit a website, your only option is to read it. On a wiki, however, you can edit both the content and the organization of the site directly, right from your web browser.

A blog is a website made up of a series of “posts,” organized with the newest information at the top of the page (Hourihan). Blogs often allow your readers to submit comments on each post.

Similarities

Wikis and blogs are often discussed in the same breath, and in some respects, they are similar. Both make web publishing fast and easy. Both are often associated with written text, but also facilitate easy publishing of pictures, movies, and animation as well. And from an educational perspective, both wikis and blogs are often used as platforms for authors to interact, negotiate, and hopefully, form communities that learn and build knowledge together.

Differences

There are many differences between these two tools, but the most salient for educators is that wikis and blogs each place authors in very different relationships with each other and with the text(s) they create.

In a wiki, the document is at the center of the authoring community. Since all of the authors can edit any of the other authors’ work, the text is owned by the community, rather than particular individuals. When used for collaborative writing, the success or failure of a wiki project often hinges on the ability of the authors to negotiate with each other and reach a consensus.

Blogs, by contrast, place authors at the center of their writing community. Authors contribute posts and get commentary and responses from other authors. Individual authors own their contributions. Other authors can make comments, but no one can edit anyone else’s work. In a blogging community, authors formulate opinions in their posts, and then defend and refine their positions as other authors post comments. Blogging projects succeed when students post formative ideas and then interact with other authors through comments and subsequent posts.

Another way to look at this difference is to think about the types of interactions you’re hoping your students will have. If you want your students to collaborate on a document, negotiate and form consensus, or build a shared collection of information, wikis might be the way to go.

On the other hand, if you’re hoping your students will formulate and defend their opinions, read and react to the writing of their peers, write outside the academic register, reflect on their learning, or write with or for an audience, you might look into a blogging project.

Just a start

My hope with this post is to put forth the beginnings of an answer, rather than a comprehensive one. For example, my discussion of wikis looks exclusively at collaborative writing and largely ignores the use of wikis for knowledge or research repositories. Currently, this is my “quick answer” to these questions, formed out of a number of interesting discussions over the past couple weeks. Hopefully, the discussions will continue here in comments and future posts!