My apologies in the process of learning to add items to mindmeister I deleted one of you items under Tools.
I am a great fan of mindmapping, we use the concept a lot in medicine, but I haven't had very much experience with it collaboratively. Our students use illness scripts (medical mindmaps) as an effective study tool when they need to remember 1000's of complex interactions. My favourite mindmapping guru is Mindmap Art.
Deirdre Bonnycastle
Posts made by Deirdre Bonnycastle
Today at 6PM PST "Global Collaborative Student Projects: How to Create an Effective Collaborative Project to Interact Online with Schools Worldwide."
http://www.learncentral.org/event/60851
I was just looking at a tremendous example of K-12 Global collaboration and realized I have 89 collaboration resources on Delicious.Enjoy.
I personally prefer and use wikis for collaboration, both small scale (research projects) and large (international project) because they provide tools for a creative initiative that builds a product which is my collaborative ideal. They change as people edit and add to others content. Pages can be rearranged and shifted to other locations to keep the site manageable. So I guess I believe that people collaborate to produce a product both tangible (papers, educational resources, events) and intangible (political change).
Learning to collaborate at the highest level takes time, so it rarely happens in 1 week assignments unless the teams have worked together previously. I think we are too hasty in bemoaning students assigning tasks because assignment is a useful method in short term projects. If you want them to collaborate at a higher level, set tasks over the semester that build team skills.
Discussion on the other hand is about learning and grappling with ideas, it is more free flowing, less organized. Discussion tools need to record statements and replies in chronological order to allow people to follow the progression. Discussion tools also need to send people emails saying there are new messages (something Wave doesn't seem to do). SCoPE is a great example of a online discussion tool because people can add new threads when they want to follow a new discussion tangent. I think SCoPE still uses Moodle.
PS I had the wrong person it was Janet Salmon not Gilly who did the session in SCoPE as Sylvia kindly reminded us.
Learning to collaborate at the highest level takes time, so it rarely happens in 1 week assignments unless the teams have worked together previously. I think we are too hasty in bemoaning students assigning tasks because assignment is a useful method in short term projects. If you want them to collaborate at a higher level, set tasks over the semester that build team skills.
Discussion on the other hand is about learning and grappling with ideas, it is more free flowing, less organized. Discussion tools need to record statements and replies in chronological order to allow people to follow the progression. Discussion tools also need to send people emails saying there are new messages (something Wave doesn't seem to do). SCoPE is a great example of a online discussion tool because people can add new threads when they want to follow a new discussion tangent. I think SCoPE still uses Moodle.
PS I had the wrong person it was Janet Salmon not Gilly who did the session in SCoPE as Sylvia kindly reminded us.
I remember a previous SCoPE session where Gilly Salmon talked about her 5 Stages of Collaboration. Unfortunately I'm not at work to find the URL but managed to find this adaption. I liked it because it described the everyone does their own thing as a step towards collaboration.