Distance Collaboration
February 19, 2008 in open source, Social Networking, Technology | No comments
I teach in a remote Adirondack school in which elementary classes typically have 10-12 students. While this may seem ideal, there are benefits to having larger groups with which to collaborate. With such small groups relations can become static. The same students have the same classmates year after year. Hopefully on-line interaction will lead to face to face collaboration as well. I hope to broaden students’ community of learners.
I have contacted the fifth grade teacher in a neighboring school district with a similar situation and we plan to explore ways for our students to work together using Web 2.0 tools. I’m considering a variety of tools:
WordPress using the Prologue theme gives a quick, clean, easy-to-use, microblogging format that makes communication spontaneous and fast moving. Students can figure it out immediately and dive right in. I think that it may be particularly useful in quickly creating discussion–especially with small groups as it keeps all discussion in one place. I’m not sure that it has all the functions that one might want for extended collaboration, although the tagging helps. It would be great to find microblogging within more comprehensive packages.
I’ve have tinkered with Moodle for several months. Moodle provides a wide variety of tools: forums, wiki, blogs, quizzes–a wide variety of tools. I think it might be too confusing for beginners. Yet Moodle is a great LMS and has a lot of collaboration tools built in.
I just created a new Elgg installation using version 0.9.1 . I’m experimenting with the user interface. It is more like the traditional social networking software with friends, personal spaces, etc. While the interface may be more complex, I think it may be more familiar to users already familiar to social networking software. I’ll post more about elgg soon.
Wiki represent a degree of collaboration I hope to obtain. It could be free standing, within Mooddle, or Elgg. I am most familiar with MediaWiki.
To begin, I’ll probably stick with Prologue/WordPress. We have relatively few participants, so the microblog might be an easier way to keep a critical mass of comments flowing. Whether we progress to Elgg or Moodle depends much upon my experiments with Elgg in the near term.
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