Group items tagged

In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.

Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."

Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.

Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums

Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"

With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.

Shai Reshef of the University of the People, an online-only institution aiming to bring quality education to students, mostly in developing nations, for whom cost is a prohibitive barrier to traditional classroom learning. Reshef told me that his University really acts as a guide, helping people to organize the types of knowledge discovery and peer-to-peer teaching activities they’re already doing into a more formal program of study. And does the University of the People model still have room for teachers? You bet.

Over the past near-decade CMSes have not only grown in scale, but feature development. Consider the variety: gradebooks, registrar system integration, e-Reserve integration, discussion tools, drop boxes, news alerts. Consider too the growth of parallel Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, podcasting.

Now to compare CMSes and Web 2.0: imagine an alternate history, a counterfactual, whereby the world outside academia had Blackboard instead of Web 2.0: § White House health care reform debates: each citizen must log into a town-hall-associated “class,” registering by zip code and social security number. Information is exchanged between “town classes” via email. Relevant documents can be found, often in .doc format, by logging into one’s town class.

§ Iranian activists collaborate via classes, frantically switching logins and handles to keep government authorities from registering and snooping. § “Citizen media” barely exist. Instead we rely on established authorities (CNN, BBC, Xinua, etc) to sift, select, and, eventually, republish rare selections of user-generated media. § Wikipedia, Flickr and Picasa, the blogosphere, Facebook and MySpace, the world of podcasting simply don’t exist. Instead, we rely on static, non-communicable Web documents, and consult the occasional e-Reserve, sometimes on a purchased DVD. § The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) maintains fan clubs, small, temporary groups where fans of certain bands and artists can sign in and listen to time-limited, DRM’d music. “It’s like tape trading, but legal!” says one promotional campaign.

Once we had Bertold Brecht writing plays for radio, neighborhood-based radio shows, and the stupendous Orson Wells; then we moved on, through payola, and onto Kasey Kasem and Clear Channel.

For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.

Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?

Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”

What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?

CMS. What is it best used for? We have said little about its integration with campus information systems, but these are critical for class (not learning) management, from attendance to grading. Web 2.0 has yet to replace this function. So imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.

It makes for a separation from the social media world, a paused space, perhaps one fertile for reflection. If that works for some situations, then it works, and should be selected… consciously, not as a default or unreflective option, but as the result of a pedagogical decision process.

The appropriate unit for this factor is probably percentage change in the organization’s curriculum spend.

That gives us a golden ratio of OER that looks something like: change in performance (as standard deviation) : change in money spent on curriculum (as percentage)

It struck me the other day when we were in class: we spent the whole class, like we do every class, on the edge of our seats; everybody was leaning forward, brainstorming, trying to solve various problems in our current project. Everybody is deeply engaged in all of it. And at the end of the class, somebody mentioned: "Isn't it funny that we get three credits for this?" I go into this classroom thinking: "This is an exciting research group. We're doing really exciting research right now." It is a class, but you almost forget that it's a class.Bayne: That speaks to a certain sort of naturalism.Wesch: That's exactly what it's about, right? When it's completely real and relevant and when what we're doing matters, the learning becomes authentic and natural. It's so much fun to do that. It creates an environment in which the students themselves are thinking about harnessing collective intelligence, because they also recognize their peers as collaborators.Bayne: Your students tend to work in groups a lot, working as a team. How do you assess individual students?Wesch: To me, the art of encouraging collaboration is like trying to find that balance between assigning individual responsibility and also finding a way to leverage all the individual contributions in a way that the endpoint is greater than the sum of its parts. The way I do that — sort of the secret behind it all — is that even though it looks like group work, every student has his or her own, very specific role and assignment in that group. A lot of that is self-constructed, so that the students are developing their own project within the larger project. That self-guided piece creates more motivation and also ultimately creates a better product, because they know better than I do what their expertise is and how they can contribute.In all of my projects, there is an individually graded piece. Every student keeps his or her own research blog. All of those blogs are aggregated into a single feed that anybody can check out. It becomes like a learning diary. I can see what they've learned and what they've contributed over time. It's the same on the wiki: the wiki is a collaborative tool, but the wiki also tracks exactly what every individual contributes.The final video project that we create will be a fifty-minute documentary, but it will be made up of sixteen projects, each one of which will be about five minutes long. Each will be individually graded. Then I'll pick the best or the most relevant to create the final fifty-minute documentary. So every student walks an individual path while at the same time contributing to the whole.