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Collaborative Environments – Student participation?Matthew Realff, Georgia Tech
Over the last two years at Georgia Tech we have been
experimenting with the use of a web collaborative environment, a CoWeb,
developed in the College of Computing by Mark Guzdial.
We have been using the environment to support collaborations between
students within classes in chemical engineering and between classes of chemical
engineers at different levels of progress. Our experience with this collaboration in chemical
engineering has been mixed. In
general, students are unwilling to participate in direct open discussions of
course content. They are more
willing to discuss issues surrounding the course, such as curriculum reform –
and prepared to be quite critical of the instructional experiences they have
received. This is in stark contrast
to the experiences of others who have used the CoWeb technology.
In the Colleges of Computing and Architecture the CoWeb has been
successful at sustaining long discussions around the content of the course. I approach this workshop with two questions derived from my experiences. First, how should we structure the rest of the instructional environment to make the use of collaborative tools as natural as possible ? Second, is there an observable characteristic of the students or instructors or course content that will enable us to understand when participation in a collaborative tool is likely to lead to a richer learning environment? |
