Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Collaborative Learning Activities Using Social Software Tools

via Virtual Canuck

The above document is actually created on writely reported here. Hence those with edit rights can modify the document. (A trim-down version of wiki???)

This is a fairly comprehensive list of "collaborative" tasks, among some of which interestingly, there are some activities to done by sololy. I think such solo task is important - such as introduction of the participants to the group. This is followed by a "who's who" activity - a kind of ice-breaking activity.

I have taken a quick look at the current blog, few minutes before I write this post and found that there were 25 posts, 7 were submitted by Donna Cameron or Terry Anderson (the course lecturers, I suppose) and the rest by 6 other people. Of course, I don't know the size of the cohort and hence very difficult to say whether the participation pattern of this blog is similiar to discussion forums (lots of lurkers and few active participants). Also I do not know the stage of the course and hence it may be at its early introduction stage. May be the authors can enlighten me.

There is a jigsaw activity included in the list. However, it seems that there is no distance technology to support the expert groups.

A note to potential adopter of this design: As it is obviously part of a course, there is an implicit timeline which serves to get most participants to work in approximately the same pace. If you are to adopt this design and if the participants may be spanning over very different time scale, it may not work. For example, it would be very difficult to enter the social group if a participant join a few months after the start. (At least, the late-comer will have a long blog to read before able to know the norms of the group, and worse still, blogs are posted in reverse chronological order, making the reading even more difficult.)

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

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4:30 am  
Blogger Unknown said...

The link to writely.com redirects to google.docs which then proclaims "Sorry, you do not have permission to access this document"...

This seems very interesting and worthwhile. Is this list of collaborative learning activities available anywhere else?

9:42 pm  
Blogger Albert Ip said...

Hi baroquedub,

Of course, by now, writely has been bought and integrated into Google Documents. In fact, they have also added shared presentation - online PowerPoint.

10:13 pm  
Blogger Unknown said...

Yes, Google Docs is very useful indeed but the writely document doesn't seem to have been ported over...

Do you happen to have a copy of the original "Collaborative Learning Activities Using Social Software Tools" list?

10:20 pm  
Blogger Albert Ip said...

Sorry, I don't

11:07 pm  
Blogger Unknown said...

Shame! But thank you for a fascinating blog anyhow. Slowly working my way through all your past posts... hoping for some new additions in the future too ;)

11:21 pm  

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