Collaborative efforts should take place but each individual should be given a separate grade for their contributions. By providing a rubric for the students to follow each person should be doing the same work and be assessed in the same way. Everyone brings their own skills to the effort, some know technology more than others, and this should be addressed by having prerequisite training or requirements for each effort. Any technology that is to be used should be discussed and resources provided for those that are not familiar with it. This will allow the rubric and assignment to be fair.
A student who does not want to network or collaborate should not take an online course. There has to be collaboration for a strong sense of community and the sharing of resources and ideas. As a fellow student I would rely on the discretion of my instructor and the faculty at the school to mediate any problems with such a student. As a fellow student I would contact the instructor about any lack of participation that involved or affected me. As an instructor this would affect my assessment of the student and reflect negatively on their grade.
Collaborating online has been a challenge this quarter. I have created an edublog and a bloglines account but am still having trouble keeping track of the blogs of my team members. Hopefully this is an issue that will get easier the more familiar I become with the technology.
Both these resources are good to help students collaborate online. This one is prefaced with a quote that "no man is an island" and gives tools for online collaboration.
Melissa, This was a great post. I like using the PBworks. Using blogger, I get emails to let me know when someone made a comment, but if I do not check my email then I forget about it. I am just glad I am not the only one have the problem keeping up with blogging. It is hard for me to fee like we are a team or group using blogger. I am not sure if it is me or because everyone is using something different. I feel the support is not there that is needed to keep this working. Now it might just be we have not used it as much and we still have a lot to learn and keep track of.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I am open to using it more and gaining more experience. However I wish there was a way to incorporate it into the blackboard platform. Maybe blackboard could put a blog tracker in or have it's own blog forum.
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