Group items tagged

"Grading will be based on attendance, enthusiastic participation in class discussion, respectful project critiques of fellow students, and clear and detailed documentation of projects (30%). Participation includes speaking during class, being attentive and engaged, as well as commenting and critiquing online materials at the class website. The first 2 projects will be each worth 15%, and the final project will be worth 40% (including documentation). Each unexcused absence will result in a loss of 10% of total points. Each failure to do the assigned readings will result in a 5% loss of total points. Projects may be done alone or in collaboration. Collaborations must document the full extent of each participant's contribution and equal effort is expected per collaborator. The final project may build on one of the previous two. "

From a VCU perspective, it is interesting that Zoom and Google Hangouts ranked at the top of the list.

VisuaPedia, the online social platform and the authoring tool that they created, provides drawing, animation and other art production tools for students. They can also collaborate on art pieces together. With the social platform integrated with authoring tools, students can view and comment on each other's works with a click.

Thank you, Rodney Dyer, for these straightforward instructions! Google Drive is a great collaborative space for communicating with students AND colleagues.

"A group of almost 40 mathematicians wrote a 600 page textbook on Homotopy Type Theory in less than six months. They taught themselves git, and they used GitHub for hosting, pull requests, and discussions. The book simply wouldn't exist without GitHub. That. Is. Amazing. I subscribed to the project on GitHub and I receive email updates every single day. The book has been released, but they're still iterating constantly. I can't even begin to comprehend the complex mathematics racing through my inbox, but the fact that these brilliant mathematicians are collaborating like this, creating something that has never existed before, out in the open, and I have a front row seat... it just blows my mind."

"The right LMS is the one that most closely aligns with empowering students to create and collaborate.  This is contrary to most learning MANAGEMENT systems.  Managing learning is the last thing that is really needed.  Tasks and abilities are limited so that the process can be managed.  Learning is a messy process. Managing learning frustrates the learner and the instructor. "

""We were initially torn between collaborating with universities and working outside the world of college," Thrun tells me. The San Jose State pilot offered the answer. "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit.""

I"ve pitched this to Robertson School folks + VCU Arts folks. An interesting area for collaboration...

The Web promised openness. Open access. Open knowledge. A wide open space for creativity. Collaboration. Distribution. Instead what we have today is a mass of information silos and content farms. What we have today, if we're honest with ourselves, are old hierarchies hard-coded onto new ones.

"The site provides science students and educators, at levels from kindergarten to college, with a free online space to create, collaborate and share their own digital drawings, Wang says. It initially was inspired by Frankel's Picturing to Learn project, where MIT and Harvard undergraduates majoring in science created drawings to explain scientific phenomena to high school students, according to Wang. Excited about the potential for drawing as a tool for students and science enthusiasts in and out of the classroom, Wang saw an opportunity in that space to infuse new energy and greater creativity into science education, he said."

"We are a 501c3 charitable organization that was formed in 2010 to fill a void with initial refugee resettlement.  We collaborate with resettlement agencies, residential property owners, educators, faith communities and other organizations to ensure that every refugee resettled in Richmond has the opportunity to establish roots and build community."

Facilitation has its own challenges. One was in facilitating collaborative work among the students. "There're a lot of assumptions made about students, that they're able to interact naturally in a group," Shen observes. "Even though you give them roles, you assume the leader will always know how to play the role of a leader, but not necessarily so." "We had to teach them group work skills too," she adds. "It's learning for both the teachers and the students."

I still can't quite grok what Mike Caulfield is doing with Smallest Federated Wiki, but this helps me more than anything else I've read. The videos sure help.

"Praxis Network programs are allied but differently-inflected humanities education initiatives, mainly focused on graduate training, and all engaged in rethinking pedagogy and campus partnerships in relation to the digital. Among other elements, the initiatives emphasize new models of methodological training and collaborative research. Each program exists within a particular ecosystem of disciplinary expectations, institutional needs, available resources, leadership styles, and specific challenges."

Some of the literature technology projects developed through the course include:

A series of e-books pairing poems with accompanying audio tracks read by the poets;
Cureador, a tool for sharing book recommendations with friends and family;
ParallelLit, a tool for comparing literary translations side-by-side;
BookTracks, a forum for creating soundtracks to novels;
Think'der, a mobile encyclopedia of thinkers and theorists, inspired by Tinder, a popular dating app;
(RE)write project, an online collaborative reimagining of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, currently offering six alternative storylines; and
Kvizsterical, an online collection of engaging literary quizzes, with topics ranging from literary monsters to authors snubbed for the Nobel Prize.

Creating a sense of community in the classroom and making meaningful student-faculty interactions can help curb retention issues in higher ed.

"I'd say the biggest observation I've come across in the last couple weeks, is that the online co-learning model breaks down the barriers of the traditional teacher/student relationship. Collaborating, sharing, and building ideas and understanding through open discuss instead bland lecture (here's the information, learn it, regurgitate it for a test). Creating the open platform to express ideas, and then expand upon them with easy reference to the information on the web (i.e., youtube videos, spotify, etc.). The responsibility then lies with each of us (student and teacher) to clearly express our meaning, intention, interpretation, and understanding of material, and back it up with an openness to build on criticism, and defend our viewpoint. And as we've discussed, they, the students, have full ownership of their work, so they may use it for future reference, when needed. In a way, it's like what Beethoven, Debussy, and punk rock have done with music. Each in their own right said, screw the "rules" I'm going to create the music I feel is necessary. The music inside me." h/t to Joyce

We've known this stuff for decades, but, still...