2009 Horizon Report: The K12 Edition

6

One Year or Less: Collaborative Environments

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
Collaborative environments are virtual workplaces where students and teachers can communicate, share information, and work together. A growing emphasis on collaboration in education — and an increasing recognition that collaboration is the norm in many modern workplaces — has led more teachers to seek tools to facilitate group interaction and teamwork in their classes. Online spaces designed to support groups of students working together take many forms, from relatively simple tools that lend themselves to multiple simultaneous authors all the way up to full-fledged classroom environments in both the flat web and the 3D world of virtual environments. Collaborative environments provide the means for students to work with peers both local and distant, practice creative teamwork, and develop peer relationships.

Overview

Collaborative environments exist in a myriad of forms. They can be simple web-based tools for collaborative work, social networking platforms, community websites, classroom management systems, multiplayer gaming environments, or even virtual worlds. The common features that unite collaborative environments are that multiple people can work within them at once; that users can leave evidence of their thoughts, and reflections on the thoughts of others; and that they can support users in any location at any time.

At one end of the spectrum are tools like Voicethread (http://voicethread.com) that make it easy to collect multiple voices and viewpoints in a single media package. Shared document editors like Adobe Buzzword (http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/), Google Docs (http://docs.google.com), and wikis allow collaborators to author a single document simultaneously. Social networking tools like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com) combine highly-customizable user profiles with collaborative tools; these spaces are aimed at social interaction rather than educational use, but they have nonetheless been used by teachers and classes to create a shared online space. Users can embed multimedia, including video, music, and images, into pages, tagging other users to associate them with a given piece of work.

More fully-featured systems like Ning (http://ning.com), Moodle (http://moodle.org), or PageFlakes (http://pageflakes.com) let teachers set up workspaces that include web feeds to pull in relevant resources, chat spaces — both synchronous and asynchronous, forums, profiles, shared documents, calendars, music, and a host of other tools, all with a few clicks. Wikis can be used in the same way. Designed to be easy to use, online collaborative environments like these make it very easy to create custom online classroom spaces for any subject.

Collaboration within 3D virtual worlds and multiplayer gaming environments takes a slightly different form, as the participants’ interactions can be more along conversational lines, and shared products are often virtual artifacts rather than text or other flat media. Students often find these spaces very engaging. Programs like HiFives (http://ced.ncsu.edu/hifives/) and GRADUATE (http://wolfden.fi.ncsu.edu/GRADUATE/Home.html) are designed to explore how students might use such spaces to develop skills in math, sciences, information technology, and other STEM subjects. In these projects, teachers collaborate with students in university game design programs using inexpensive gaming engine software to design environments and challenges for their 5th – 8th grade classes. Similar efforts are underway by Global Kids (http://www.globalkids.org/) to investigate the use of the virtual world of Second Life™ for K-12 education.

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Collaborative environments of all kinds extend the classroom, eroding geographic and time limitations that used to constrain academic interactions. Students can work on group homework assignments with their peers whether or not they are able to get together physically, and can receive feedback and coaching from teachers outside of school hours, if both parties wish. The removal of such limitations is accompanied, however, by questions about the security of information shared online, a major concern for schools. Protection of student work as well as the responsibility for keeping students in safe places on the web — without limiting intellectual access to high quality sites — are both challenges schools are working to address.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Expression

As noted above, collaborative environments foster teamwork and collaboration, but students can also develop individual skills in such spaces. By practicing critical thinking in a more or less public forum, students can benefit from seeing what their peers have to say and from critiquing each other’s work. In a world where factual information exists side by side with incorrect or misleading statements and opinions stated as facts, students must learn to critically examine what they see and hear. Collaborative environments provide workspaces in which such activities may take place in an open, constructive way, linked to classroom content. For example, social studies classes use iCue (http://www.icue.com/), a site produced by NBC News, to “collect” news stories, share them, and reflect and respond to the perspectives presented by the news media.

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Collaboration in an in-class setting presents teachers with the challenge of capturing and managing ideas that often come and go in student discussions at a very fast pace. Such dialog is beneficial to students and supports constructivist learning goals, but assessment can be difficult in real time. Collaborative environments can be used to record such conversations in various ways, so that both teachers and students can revisit and review discussions throughout the school year. Blogs and wikis are ideal means for this, as are visual tools like Mindmeister (http://mindmeister.com), a web application that makes it easy to attach discussion points around a central issue. The map can be recorded and replayed to review who contributed at each point; since it resides online, students can continue the discussion from any Internet-enabled computer.

Online collaborative environments invite global initiatives. The Center for 21st Century Skills has developed a space in the virtual world of Second Life called the International Virtual Collaboration Space to support students working with their peers around the world. Students in Finland and in Connecticut will be using the space to design collaborative projects (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_1n3iNBsG8 for a 7-minute video describing the space). Students working in collaborative environments also have opportunities to connect with experts, professionals, researchers, and others beyond their classroom walls. A collaboration between the LA MEDiA Quick Start Collaborative based at Los Angeles Valley College, the CALIFORNIA MEDiA Statewide CTE Hub, and partners in media production, film, and animation has resulted in an online collaborative space where students from kindergarten through college can work on film and media projects, receive feedback from other students and professionals, and maintain a learning portfolio that follows them throughout their education and career (see http://marypickford.com/images/stories/movies/la-media-promo-main-sequence_h264_400kbs_640x480.mov).

The benefits of collaborative environments extend to professional interactions for teachers as well. Shared professional spaces create opportunities for teachers to dig deeper, ask questions of their colleagues, explore projects that others are doing, and engage in ongoing professional development wherever they happen to be. Classroom 2.0 (http://www.classroom20.com/) is a community of nearly 20,000 teachers that is supported by the Ning environment; the teachers can join interest groups within the larger community, post and respond to questions, share links, and take part in deep discussions about integrating emerging web technologies into the practice of teaching. RezEd.org (http://rezed.org) uses a similar space for professional development around teaching with virtual worlds, as does the Flat Classroom Project (http://flatclassroomproject.ning.com/) for collaborative projects.

A sampling of applications of collaborative environments across the curriculum includes the following:

• Language Arts. Students at the International School of Bangkok are part of a collaborative community made up of students from four other schools around the world. Using blogs and podcasts to share their reading and writing strategies, they sharpen reading and writing skills by collaboratively authoring class blogs and producing informative podcasts for other elementary school students.
• Natural Sciences. Students in New York City and Chicago collaborated with researchers in the program I Dig Tanzania, a collaboration between Global Kids and the Field Museum of Chicago’s Biodiversity Synthesis Center. Teen Second Life was used to support the students’ collaboration and learning about paleontology and Tanzanian culture (see http://www.holymeatballs.org/2008/08/idt_i_dig_tanzania_promo_video.html).
• U.S. History. An 8th grade history teacher at Del Mar Middle School in California uses a wiki customized with primary source material, polls, videos, and images as a workspace for his students to investigate and analyze U.S. history. The students do research online, prepare their arguments collaboratively and singly in the wiki as homework, and then discuss their findings in class (see http://delmarhistory8.wikispaces.com/).

Collaborative Environments in Practice

The following links provide examples of how collaborative environments are being used in schools.

Always Learning: Projects
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/projects/
At the International School Bangkok, students in kindergarten through fifth grade collaborate with their peers around the world using a range of methods including social networking tools, collaborative workspaces, blogs, wikis, and microblogging tools.

Avatars
http://voicethread.com/share/235108/
Students at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts worked with a local school to integrate inexpensive, easy collaboration tools into first and second grade classes. “Avatars” was created by second graders using Voicethread to share their personal avatars and express the reasons for their artistic choices.

Connected.info
http://connected.info
Students at the Center for Advanced Research and Technology, a high school in Clovis, California, use Connected.info to collaborate on assignments. Students can create blog posts, edit group wiki pages, contribute to discussion forums, and share notes online.

Learning Library
http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/ll2/NMLLL.html
Scheduled for release in May 2009, the Learning Library presents a variety of interactive learning challenges that are designed for students to work through. The challenges are structured to encourage practice and exploration in new media literacy skills.

SWIFT
http://www.swiftclassroom.com
SWIFT is a collaborative environment building tool designed for teachers to quickly and easily publish class websites. Teachers can make updates quickly, stay in touch with parents, and keep students informed of classroom assignments and policies. Several schools districts in the Puget Sound, Washington area and a few international schools in Africa use SWIFT district-wide.

Youth Media Exchange
http://ymex.org/
Youth Media Exchanges is a partnership between Global Kids and TakingITglobal, in association with the Asia Society. The groups use a social network to support youth in the U.S. and Asia as they develop 21st century learning skills while collaborating on creative projects based on global issues.

For Further Reading

The following articles and resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about collaborative environments.

Collaboration Tools
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/CollaborationTools/47200
(Cyprien Lomas, Michael Burke, and Carrie Lee Page, EDUCAUSE Connect (White Paper), August 2008.) This white paper discusses collaboration tools used by students, ways that students already use them, and ways that faculty can leverage students’ familiarity with and use of collaboration tools to extend discourse beyond the classroom.

Edublogging: Instruction for the Digital Age Learner (PDF)
http://bonsall.schoolwires.com/1512109262125477/cwp/view.asp?A=3&Q=277322&C=55071
(Jeffrey P. Felix, Ed.D.) This white paper is a study of blogging use in K-12 schools in the United States. The author also considers teachers’ perceptions of how blogging is influencing their own instruction methods.

Implementation Study #3: Moodle
http://www.k12opentech.org/implementation-study-3-moodle
(Steve Hargadon, K-12 Open Technologies, 17 January 2008.) This study reviews Moodle, an open source collaborative online classroom environment, from the perspective of its applicability to K-12.

Social Networks in Education
http://socialnetworksined.wikispaces.com/
This wiki site hosts an updateable list of social networks online that are used in school environments.

Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23898_1
(Chris Riedel, T.H.E. JOURNAL, February 2009.) This article highlights ten high quality online tools, some of which use some social networking in the classrooms of younger students.

Delicious: Collaborative Environments
http://delicious.com/tag/hzk09+collabworkspaces
(Tagged by K-12 Horizon Advisory Board and friends, 2009). Follow this link to find additional resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hzk09” and “collabworkspaces” when you save them to Delicious.