Technology for Collaborative Research
This is an in-class group exercise. Each group must devise a method to collaboratively search, find, collect, and organize information within a group. I do this small in-class exercise before they begin working on major group projects to get them to collaborate more efficiently and effectively within their groups.
Through this exercise, students also attempt to meet the technology goals as indicated in the ISTE Standard●S 7 (see Figures 1 & 2 below).
Why I Do This
Throughout the semester, students have to work collaboratively with their peers to complete their group projects. To complete most of the group projects in this class, students have to research information and look for resources as a group. Unfortunately, most students do not use appropriate tools and methods to collaborate and communicate to research information and look for resources, and manage the information and resources once they were found. This creates so many unexploited opportunities (times and places), and so much time is wasted, resulting in having very little time to work on the group projects except for when they physically meet in class or outside class occasionally.
In the past semesters my attempts to get students to try and use better collaboration methods led to little success. They wouldn't try any new approaches. I wondered why, so I conducted a survey about it. Below are the two responses from students, which summarize the reasons why they were not eager to try new and better collaboration methods.
We cannot spare time for learning extra tools and methods in addition to actually doing the project. We barely have enough time to complete our projects.
The way we currently collaborate works fine. If it works fine, don't try to fix it.
The problem is that they barely had enough time to complete their projects because they didn't learn new and better ways to collaborate. Another problem is that their ways of collaboration were far from being fine. They worked as if they were still in 1995, and there were so many unexploited times and places for collaborative work.
Because they didn't want to spend time for it if it was not part of their projects, I had to turn it into a group project. Once they created the technological structure for collaboration, they appeared to be collaborating better in the subsequent group projects and assignments.
Criteria for Collaboration Method |
Each group must devise a collaboration method that satisfies the six criteria below:
① Easy Curation & ShareWhen a group member searches and finds information and resources (e.g., articles, books, slides, pictures, videos, audio clips, apps) online, he/she needs to be able to curate them easily and everyone in the group must be able to see the curated information and resources.
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② Store SourcesWhen they curate information and resources, they also must be able to store their sources.
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③ AnnotateWhen a group member has fond information and resources, he/she must be able to add annotations (his/her own notes) to them (either to the page or to the selected section) so that everyone in his/her group will know why he/she shared the information and resources and how he/she thinks group members can use them.
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④ Comments & ResponsesAnyone in the group must be able to add a comment to any curated information and resources. Each member also must be able to respond to existing comments so that part of the discussions can be done right there without waiting to physically meet in person or using a separate communication tool (e.g., group chat, email) to discuss it.
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⑤ Curate SelectionsIt's even better if group members can curate and share the selected text instead of the whole page. Because they often don't need all the information on the page, this significantly reduces time for everyone in the group to go through the curated information, making the sharing process more efficient.
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⑥ Organize & LabelIt's better if group members can organize the curated information and resources in ways that make better sense to everyone in the group through tagging, labeling, categorization, folder structure, etc.
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Evaluation & Grading Rubric
Two students in each group hook their laptops to the two main monitors in the classroom (Figure 9) and demonstrate their collaborative search & curate process, which is then graded on how efficiently they carry out each of the 6 criteria listed above. See the attached rubric for grading details (Figure 10).