dkimmey: Can I pose a question then? Let's think logistically about collaboration in the classroom: How do you propose students "divide" up the work? And how do you help them to work past those hurdles of everyone not participating equally or fully? Part of the lesson with collaboration is about working together, and talking with the instructor circumvents that lesson. I wonder: does it help to assign a "project manager" role in the wiki?

glennhendler: For better or worse, I've largely left that up to them.

dkimmey: I'm curious about this because the best moments in my class with the wiki were when I was explicit about their options.

glennhendler: I had no experience with teaching collaboration, though I've always liked it. So I just tell them they have to collaborate, and hope they do so in a productive way.

jentery: I have them identify roles within the group.

glennhendler: Interesting, Jentery; what kinds of roles do they identify?

jentery: With service-learning, here are some examples: "community-based researcher," "library researcher," "coordinator," "conversation facilitator," "editor" and they write collaborative papers.

glennhendler: Are these roles you listed for them, or did they come up with them?

dkimmey: And what is the coordinator role?

jentery: I suggest them, but they almost always make up new ones. The coordinator arranges meetings and such

dkimmey: Ah...

glennhendler: I like how that makes them think hard about what collaboration entails.

jentery: We also have a class on theories of collaboration. I basically start with how collaboration is valorized and can often (most often?) lead to a handful of people doing most of the work. Then we work through examples of how that might be so, to then ask why that happens and why it matters in the first place.

glennhendler: I've found I don't have to start there, Jentery--or rather, they automatically start there, since that's their experience.

jentery: Yes, we use their experiences as the core of the conversation

glennhendler: Do they students ever get annoyed at that level of explicitness? I sometimes hear complaints that we spend more time talking about what we're going to do and how, and not enough time doing it.

jentery: I have never had issues (on evals or in class). I think they appreciate the move to question the very thing I'm asking them to do.

dkimmey: One other follow-up, Jentery --- and then I'd like to shift the conversation a bit. Something I thought about just now in hearing about the collaborative writing component is that your wiki doesn't fully show the dynamic process you staged within the class. In other words, the writing didn't seem as though it was fully engaging the practices students were engaged with through their community based research, interviews, etc. Posed as a question, then ... How does the technological medium relate to the practices we're asking students to engage in?

glennhendler: Ooh....a question that we'll take with us to the ASA panel....

jentery: I certainly see that, Deborah. It just goes back to the issue of making public student writing. The practices were on a passcode-protected blog. They were visible internally.

dkimmey: So then can you answer the question by sharing from your experience with the blog?

jentery: The one about the medium?

dkimmey: Yes. And for everyone, actually

glennhendler: Hmmmm....that's tough.

jentery: I would simply say that the medium lays bare the process of writing (over writing as end-product or cause and effect), stresses problematics over problems, and articulates a somewhat open system of feedback. For that reason, I don't do "peer review" in my classes. It's built into the system -- into the medium. I also use it to project student work during class.

glennhendler: I think my first answer wouldn't be much more complex than that it's just that--a medium, and one that allows for collaboration that is visible to me as the instructor. Jentery, that's great point; I like that. I've never been that crazy about the standard forms of peer review, but I'm comfortable with this one.

dkimmey: Can I pose another question that relates? and we can come back to points where we see fit? One thing I noticed that was emphasized using the wiki was that the usual "monitoring" that students do (of checking in to see which answers the instructor "likes" and which ones s/he doesn't) was even more obvious with the wiki. That is to say, they would try to figure out what I "liked" about group work, and then they would merely duplicate each other's approach. I'm curious about how we allow students to take the full opportunity of collaborative work, while still recognizing their individual and distinct group collaborations. … So, breaking them of the "right" answer mentality.

glennhendler: To be honest, I don't have much problem with the "monitoring" as you describe it. I feel like the things I'm asking of them are so different from what's asked of them in most classes, that they need some of that pressure and emulation just to grasp it, or else they fall back into their standard ways of approaching writing and thinking.

tobiasucla: I think the site kind of forces students to think differently. It works beautifully with a keywords approach. Presentations, in which student talk about how they've defined their word, how it's changed, how's it's connected to other words, and where they think it's going…

jentery: I agree, Steve -- especially if the class dynamic corresponds with the wiki dynamic.

dkimmey: But how can the wiki mirror that approach to class discussion?

glennhendler: Or maybe the question is how can class discussion mirror the wiki dynamic?

jentery: I would be leery of articulating the technology as a mirror. A correspondence is not a mirror, is what I suppose I'm saying.

dkimmey: Fair enough …

glennhendler: I sometimes present the wiki (and even more so, discussion forums on Blackboard) as the way that those students who don't like to talk in class can boost their participation grade. I very much hope you're right about that last point, Steve. But how can you tell if that's happening, is my nagging question. If the students are teaching each other how to write together.

tobiasucla: They are. Students just need some structure to work within so they don't feel cut lose--as in most peer-review they've done. They talk about what's going well and what they've had to change up, what's happening, etc.

dkimmey: Here's maybe something that makes our site really, truly useful if students are tracking contestations and multiple meanings, it's clearly not about right or wrong answers ... so there's already an open field for them to produce something.

glennhendler: Yes.

tobiasucla: And they have examples of solid definitions--the book!

dkimmey: But how do you make that more than about "tracking" and "recording" the course material?

jentery: Here, re: tracking and recording, I would re-iterate the need for emergent courses.

dkimmey: I guess one thing I struggle with is that -- because I teach very historicist classes -- oftentimes the claims that students are prepared to make through the course readings are ones that I already know. How can instructors construct courses where the keyword-inquiry isn't about making a ready-made claim (<x> was a modern invention, social construction, etc, etc) ... but instead is about staging a conversation that enables students to participate as "producers" and not as "transcribers"?

jentery: For me, predictably, this is a question about how we theorize technology. Hayles's dynamic of "making, storing, transmitting" is useful.

tobiasucla: If they're interpreting changes in a word's meaning, that's pretty active, right?

jentery: Indeed. I was just going to add that keyword approaches stress change. The question is not comparing def X and def Y, but how X got to Y. To echo Steve, that's productive/active/affirmative.

tobiasucla: Or how X is still present IN Y.

glennhendler: But also how at a given moment, how X and Y coexist even though they're contradictory. Though I want to avoid going too far with these Xes and Ys.....

dkimmey: Isn't that something you know before? What is it that you encounter with them? I'm all about learning with (and from) students ... but I find these hard classes to teach because it's a model of inquiry that I'm trained in, so I know in advance where it will go. And I'd rather teach classes where it's not about getting them "up to speed" but about what we can produce as a class together.

jentery: I agree, Deborah. But you have to make that clear from day one. Try letting them gather the course material. And then deal with a litany of questions about how you are an "expert" on the course topic. Plus, in asking them to assemble material, you can teach research methods.

tobiasucla: Yep. And what makes for a recognizable academic question within the field.

dkimmey: Yes, Jentery, like your archive class this last quarter ... that is a really good approach, and maybe one that we can borrow for Keywords, since part of what I'm hoping to host through the site are multiple approaches/assignments.

glennhendler: But seriously, Deborah: Maybe I'm old and jaded, but I don't very often expect to learn something that fundamentally new from the students. At least not in the sense that they come up with a whole new formulation, an alternative to something like "X is socially constructed." But I certainly learn new things about the materials we're reading. And about them, too, which is endlessly fascinating.