Group Work

This afternoon Ed, Van and I attended a workshop on Group Work (Let’s Collaborate! Create a User-Friendly Online Group) organized by Tanja Hodges from ATLAS.  It was actually a fun hour - I think we met some great people who we will probably run into again either on campus or online during our SIB Online Learning Endeavors.  Here are my notes from the workshop:

A. Why do learners dislike group work? (the following points were generated by attendees)

• Social loafing
• Activity is not appropriate for group work
• Loners
• Coordination takes time
• Instructor intimidated
• Instruction not clear
• Biased because of previous bad experience
• Aversion to group grading
• Do not have the right social skills
• Do not possess the right technology skills

B. Why assign group work? (the following points were generated by attendees)

• Peer teaching/learning, access to more perspectives, increases diverse learning experience
• Deeper level of thinking, engagement.
• More reflective of real-life/professional experience/environment
• Accountability
• Minimize grading? (those with experience in group work did not think it would be less work on the instructor's part)

Our goal is to balance the concerns listed in A, while reaping the benefits listed in B.

Provide context of why students need to do an assignment.  Why you think it is important that they learn this content in a collaborative fashion!!

How to make group work successful…

1. Develop a firm foundation

• Build a learning community (connection, trust, honest communication, explicitly stating expectations)

2. Provide clear instructions

• State your learning objectives (provide direction for both facilitators and the learners) – give meaning – communicate expectations – help motivate learners – provide a path toward evaluation.
• Meticulously compose project guidelines and activities.  Not just on end product, but also about the group process.  How often will the group members need to log in?  What roles will learners need to assume?  Will learners be able to ‘fire’ a group member who is under-performing?  Provide access to exemplary examples.

3. Enact effective communication procedures

•  In online environment communication is perhaps the largest challenge.
• Asynchronous: examples are discussion boards – email – wiki – blogs – google docs – twitter
• Synchronous : examples are Elluminate – skype – telephone – chats -

4. Offer frequent feedback

• Provide detailed project rubrics
• Long-term group effort is composed of several smaller group efforts along the way.
• Guide-post activities (formative feedback)
• Use assessments to:
• Address group accountability
• Address Individual accountability - CMS is your friend!  Journaling Activities (How did I contribute to my group this week? Personal between instructor and student or open?)

Something to think about: is it important that you be able to monitor most of your student’s communication?

By the way, Tanja mentioned that ATLAS will be organizing a 4 week Group Work course during the Spring semester.  I took a course like that from ION, might be good for somebody from our team to take the online version.

M

EPals

Epals.com

Through Epals a classroom can connect with another classroom (anywhere in the world) in order to participate in joint projects, and share emails, photos and videos.  Epals can bring a topic to life for students and is specifically built for primary and secondary education.  It is is a safe way to explore the world outside of your community and make connections with others that can be half a world away.       

A review of a Geography project using Epals:
http://cnx.org/content/m32249/latest

This is a link to some of the projects that EPals does with National Geographic:
http://epals.us/projects/info.aspx?DivID=index

Online Collaboration Tools

How to communicate and share work when working in a group online?

e-mail - that is pretty straight forward, but can get quite cumbersome very fast.

googledocs - the gold standard at the moment - very convenient.  Need to have a google account before you can start, but who does not have a google account these days?

dropbox - a tool you can use that creates similar folders on different computers (even smart phones) - it also keeps on online copy.  Need to download the application before you can start.

Survey

I created a Survey at Survey Monkey using questions that I am gathering through my ION Group Work course.

I found the tool easy to use - but I initially created my first few questions without scrolling all the way down to see all the options available to me (like being able to add comment boxes). So make sure to scroll down.

I designed the questions to find out how well a group worked together on a project. Some questions are trying to find out the same thing but from different angles. There are maybe one or two more questions I would have liked to have asked, but I would have needed the pro version.

The link:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VNBCJQC

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Can't see the forest for the trees?

Sometimes I am just overwhelmed by the number of tools that can be used in an online learning environment. The websites explaining these tools are one top of all the content I come across when working background for my research. How to keep track of it all.

For the last few months I have been using Diigo to help me keep track of it all. You can become a user for free and it helps you annotate, archive and organize all the websites that are of use to you. In that way it kind of serves as a fancy bookmarking tool (if you were really good about sub-categorizing bookmarks - my bookmarks tab had 50 entries in random order - not very useful). But Diigo asks you for tags to the website (some are already suggested by the article itself) and later you can quickly search interesting sites by tag.

During my Tech Tools course I learned to also become a member of a Diigo group. In this group setting all the bookmarks from members in a group come together. This could be very helpful for class activity. Sometimes, as an instructor or a student, you read something that you want to share with your class - putting it in this group will enable others to see what you were so excited about (you can even include comments) without bothering them with yet another e-mail or twitter. After the course is over the bookmarks can still be a great resource to refer back to.

It takes a little while to remember to use the Diigo tool, however, it is very easy to use and the toolbar I installed makes things even easier.

When to use a wiki or a blog - and what is the difference?

Answering the second question is much easier. The first one I am still trying to figure out.

A blog can be viewed as an online journal of a particular owner/author. It is updated whenever the author has something to share (weekly, daily, hourly). Blogs do have spaces for opinions of readers to be posted, but readers do not alter the initial post.

A wiki is a website that is meant for multiple people to update in real time from all around the world. Wiki entries/articles represent a consensus, but again there is an area for discussion and comments.

Wiki's can host a blog, but not vice versa.

Blogs:
- Usually a single author. Sometimes can have multiple contributors,
- Author posts, user comments,
- Opinion Sharing ,
- One-to-many content.

Wiki:
- Multiple Authors,
- Edited by a group or team,
- Contains links to other Wiki pages,
- Continuousy changing and growing rapidly,
- Many-to-many communication.

Both blogs and wikis can be used in online courses. This blog was started to serve my journal while discovering new tools to use for online learning in my Tech Tools ION course. It follows along as I learn more on the topic.

Wikis are probably more useful for group projects. I place to share material created by group members as well as a place for discussion and editing to occur.

I personally really like blogger for blogs, mainly because I familiar with the tool plus it is linked to my google account. For wikis I use pbworks, another very intuitive tool.

This article, by Bill Ferriter is a great resource to find out how to use blogs and wikis in education.

I have not really used blogs and wikis for educational purposes (except as a student, with mixed results). Some problems I see with this technology is that it takes a student away from the main course website, in addition if the group working on the wiki is large it can become quite cumbersome. I will post more on this topic later when I have more experience actually using it as an instructor.