Collaborative Writing in a Scale-Up Classroom

One of my main goals for this summer is to prepare my spring 2013 (!!) History 101: Western Civilization I class. I am teaching it in the University of North Dakota’s new Scale-up classroom. This is a large classroom (150+ seats) arranged to facilitate students engaged in group work rather than “passively” (whatever that really means) absorbing a lecture. Students are arranged around a series of 9 person tables each with three computers. These computers, in turn, link to a bewildering array of monitors that allow each group of 3 students to instantly display their work to entire class or just one section of the class.

These rooms were initially designed around teaching sciences (or more broadly STEM discipline), but I have been given the opportunity to teach a humanities class in this room. Last spring I posted a copy of my proposed class here. This summer, I am attempting to work on some of the niggling details:

1. Collaborative Writing Software. I am looking for some software that will facilitate some serious collaborative writing. Ideally, it will allow me not only to track contributions from each collaborator, but also have some version control and allow for the neat and easy output into a more standard format (let’s say pfd of .docx). I’d also like the interface to be as user-friendly as possible and, of course, it needs to be web-based and scalable to allow collaborations of groups of at least 9.

We use Blackboard as our LMS here at UND, and, while it has discussion boards, wikis, blogs and other basic collaborative functions, I am not sure that any of these are robust or well-articulated enough to serve as the center piece for an entire class. So any suggestions for collaborative writing software would be greatly appreciated.

2. Enticing Students to Collaborate. When I was a college student, I hated group work, hated collaboration, and probably spent a good bit of time hating my fellow students. (Yeah, I was fun kid). It was only toward the end of my graduate school career that I began to understand the value of collaboration and its potential to produce more than the sum of its parts. These days, most of my scholarly output is collaborative. I want to bring the excitement of collaborative work to my students and prove to them the dreadful experiences associated with most “group work” are not intrinsic to collaboration, but issues of execution.

So my goal over the next week is to create a series of exercises in the beginning of the semester that seduce the students into appreciating the creative potential of collaborative work.  As the class focuses on how pre-industrial societies in the West responded to challenges and limitations imposed by their physical environment, I am very tempted to start the class with the classic desert island scenario. In this scenario you ask each student to come up with 5 rules to govern a society of shipwreck survivors on a deserted island. Then, I will ask them to merge their list of 5 with two other students. Then with the other students at the their table. And finally, we will come up with a definitive list of 5 basic rules agreed upon by the entire class. This exercise would then lead to a discussion of Hammurabi’s early law code and thoughts on how pre-industrial societies adapted to various social and natural limits.

3. Grading Collaborative Work. Part of the dread associated with collaborative work is the fear that someone else will bring you down. In the so-called “private sector”, successful collaborative work is grounded in mutual respect, shared priorities, and, of course, trust. These are commodities that do not develop over night or under the watchfully insistent gaze of the teacher, but through sustained interaction, commonly agreed upon goals, and the willingness to compromise individual achievement for the success of the group. This works against the prevailing, individualistic attitudes toward grades. What I need to figure out is a system where individual grades and group grades are balanced out.

So, as I work through these things over the next few weeks, I’ll report back.