GROUP WORK AND ASSESSMENT

Group assessment brings its own problems and joys. The project on group blogging, with my colleague Jenny Nicholls, has been really successful. The third year drama students have enjoyed the task and the medium, and used the blogging space to move forward their ideas about playbuilding each week. Students worked on the blogs collaboratively out of class each week, and workshopped ideas together, face-to-face, in class time. And given that it’s much harder for students to successfully organise group tasks (like everyone else, they have very busy lives), the blogs helped with time management and building group identity. Now for the marking! And to see how the workload goes, and whether the students adhered to the guidelines which asked them to refer to the literature and reflect on the whole process.


GROUP WORK AND ASSESSMENT RESOURCES

Here are some great resources if you want to know more about group work and how to manage it.

Doing Group Assessment in Media and Communication
http://creative.canberra.edu.au/groupwork/Intro/Frameset.html
This site contains case studies, videos and text-based learning design information about group assessments. Issues such as group management, feedback, peer assessment and supporting technologies are addressed. There are keynote video interviews with Professors Sharon Bell, Ron Oliver, Tom Reeves, Jan Herrington and John Hedberg. The consortium responsible includes: the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra (lead institution), School of Media Film & Theatre and College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, ICT Innovations Centre, Macquarie University and the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney.

Good practice: Assessment: Part B. Implementing assessment
http://www.uow.edu.au/about/teaching/goodpractice/UOW008515.html
This is a clearly laid out resource from the University of Wollongong.

Assessing Group Work
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/group.html
Again, another high quality resource. It has been developed by the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. There's an accompanying PowerPoint presentation worth viewing.

Teaching with technology

It’s interesting that by exploring the use of technology in teaching and learning we not only evaluate what is important to us in the curriculum, but the process tends to encourage collaboration – of teachers with mentors, teachers with technical specialist, teachers with other teachers and librarians, teachers with students, and students with peers. Each drawing on the skills, knowledge and attitudes of others. That collaboration is not easy, and made more difficult because many are used to working at their teaching on their own. Working with others across disciplines and specialist areas can only make education richer, even if we are only thinking more about how and what we teach.

Here are teachers in different parts of the world having a go at teaching with technology.

Teacher Talk, NSW, Australia




Teaching with Technology, California, USA

What's the value of blogs in higher education?

Blogging shouldn’t be seen as an isolated phenomenon, according to Marcus Donnell (2006*), who comments on blogging from a journalist’s perspective. It’s part of a whole set of set of practices conducted over the net. Blogs happen in the midst of many different cyber cultures. We are not just thinking about communicating in the blogosphere, it’s blogging within myspace, Myflikr, My librarything, My youTube, My delicious, My skype, My secondlife, My podcasting, if you’re a student - My online tutorial, each with their own culture and norms. All various forms of personal publishing.

So if we start thinking about what is happening in a group blog – how does this subvert the norm of blogging? Or does it? Does a group blog just represent a series of personal blogs jammed together, or do we get some other synergy happening? Maybe this is dependent on the level of authoring rights of those contributing to the blog. Perhaps it’s also dependent on context.

In terms of students using a blog for a group project to document process, I wonder how much the blog will be viewed as a personal vehicle for expression, rather than a group effort. Still more monologue than dialogue?

In our project with the drama students, the group blog is replacing individual student journals. So while documentation is still a key outcome, the practices around that documentation are quite different. It is a public and shared form of documentation, no longer a private contribution submitted only to the lecturer. It requires interaction with peers – but whether this means students get to know their peers any better or establish stronger learning communities is to be revealed. Group blogging is a digital record on the web, available for scrutiny as it develops, a formative document - unlike the traditional student journal, printed out in hard copy and presented as a summary evaluation on demand.

No doubt we can expect to see some differences in outcomes.

I want to know if students share more ideas or resources using blogs as a digital record than they would just meeting face-to-face each week. We’ll know in about 6 months I guess!

Some student blogs to compare from the Vine Drama Project look like this:

JeMeGe, secondary students: entries are individually posted under a single account http://jemege.vineblogs.net/

Little inventors, primary students (Year 6?): each post is generated by the group , not individuals
http://class6m.vineblogs.net/



* O'Donnell, M. (2006). Blogging as pedagogic practice: Artefact and ecology. Asia Pacific Media Educator, (17), 5-19.

Video Games and Engineering

This is a great example of authentic, complex learning environments. In an advanced computing course at Northern Illinois University, mechanical engineering students work in teams to program and create video games. After creating their virtual models, students can enrol in another course and take their designs to the next level, and turn them into real products, real racing cars.

Group blogging

My colleague Jenny and I have been playing around some more with the group blog idea - testing things out so we can predict issues students might come up against this semester in their drama course, when they use blogs to help with the play building process.



You can see what we been up to here on the Timetoplay blog.






It’s interesting using a blog which is really a tool designed in the first instance for single authorship, as a group authoring tool. Once you introduce multiple authors, you need to think about the way primacy is given to the main author's entries - comments from others are nested away at a secondary level of access. The reader is directed to the first author entries, not the secondary comments. (Using the tagging function will be important if you want to find anything buried on the blog in a comment.)

If you’re working a group blog and all entries are of equal weight then everyone will need first author rights to post (upload files and rights to manage the site). Each author may tend to create new posts each time too, rather than adding an entry as a ‘comment’, so as to keep their posting at the highest level – not lost in the shadows of the blog. This will be interesting to track in the context of writing within a students' group blog which is assessed.



BTW: This group blog for Women in the Media and News has 50 authors - so anything is possible I guess!