CS182

Social Software and student collaboration : del.icio.us groups

How can the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us be used within a course to give pedagogical impact rather than an optional frill? Here’s one idea:

Background

A teacher will often want to do a certain project with groups of students rather than individuals — maybe there’s a shortage of resources or maybe having students cooperate in groups is appropriate to the subject matter or ethos of the course.

However, such group work raises issue of ensuring that all participants pull their weight and also the conundrum of assessing / grading the final project knowing that there has been uneven effort expended by the group participants in creating the final sumission.

Social Software and Collaboration

Let’s take a small class with 16 students, and divide it into 4 groups of 4 students each. There are 4 topics to cover and each student in the group will research and write about one of these topics in their blog:

1. Freedom of information. (Internet censorship in china and collusion by US companies)
2. Credibility of information on the internet. How much can you believe of what you read from the web. How accurate is Wikipedia? What are the issues with Wikipedia and how does these encapsulate attitudes towards using the internet as a primary source for knowledge?
3. Searching and Google — what are the issues associated with the Google monopoly? How do these play out in the world? Will GooglePrint change the face of libraries as we know them?
4. Privacy and security — how much personal information is outmon the internet. How much is inaccurate? What are the privacy issues with accumulating user’s browsing habits, shopping preferences, likes and dislikes? Data mining to extract inferences — 2 + 2 > 4.

Then each group will have a wiki site where they bring together these topics and write about connections and interrelationships between them.

Each student will have their own del.icio.us user account and will accumulate bookmarks to useful web resources appropriate to their topic. Among the tags used for these bookmarks will be an agreed topic tag which is shared by all the students from each group researching the same topic. Thus the ‘freedom of information’ topic might have an agreed tag called ‘FreeInfo’. In this way students will share their bookmarks with others from different groups researching the same topic and by this means will establish a community of practice across groups.

This process will be easy to assess in del.icio.us since the teacher can easily select the tag used by each topic and see how many bookmarks were added by which student.

Summary

Topic	Group Collaborate: wiki	Group 1	Topic collaborate : shared bookmarks	Group 2	Group Collaborate: wiki
Freedom Information	^ | | | | | ^	student 1	<——>	student 5	^ | | | | | ^
Credibility		student 2	<——>	student 6
Searching		student 3	<——>	student 7
Privacy		student 4	<——>	student 8