Classroom brainstorming doesn't necessarily mean chalk and a blackboard anymore. As technology creeps into the classroom, so are networked collaborative learning programs.
Hoping that group learning technology will trigger student creativity, the California Community Colleges Foundation on Monday announced a partnership to distribute Sixth Floor Media's collaborative writing software across the 106-school, 1.5-million student system.
"Instead of one person alone working on a report, this brings people together to spawn new ideas," says Judy Einstein, vice president of the foundation. "It creates a different kind of energy and enthusiasm, and empowers students to be more creative."
The CommonSpace software allows side-by-side writing spaces on a cross-platform digital document: using a campus network, students can file papers which other students and teachers can then comment on in "margin" areas. CommonSpace 2.0 was released in September and currently boasts several hundred classroom subscriptions. Originally conceived by Carnegie Mellon educational researchers, the idea behind the software is to offer a collaborative space for critical analysis, draft comparisons, and peer review.
"There's a dramatic improvement in work when students get peer review and instructor feedback," explains John Rueter, director of Sixth Floor Media, a division of Houghton Mifflin. "Often times we get feedback only on the final draft of a document; the [Carnegie Mellon] research showed tremendous improvement if there is collaboration all the way through the process."
The California Community Colleges Foundation, for its part, has been pushing an initiative called California 2001, in an attempt to work with more technology companies. After showcasing CommonSpace in its Multisensory Learning Lab - a traveling multimedia RV that visits colleges to introduce teachers to new technologies - the foundation decided that the software was well-suited to the college system's classrooms.
CommonSpace will be offered at half price - the program normally costs US$70 per workstation - for community colleges to implement on the campus networks and labs. The foundation plans to use the collaborative writing programs to not only introduce students to more creative learning processes, but as a way to "mirror what's going on in the workplace today." Einstein also hopes that the software will enable home learning, since the state-wide system is currently suffering a serious classroom crunch.
"Community colleges in California are facing a huge surge in enrollment. We don't have the facility to take [new students] in," explains Einstein. "We have do with what we have, and technology makes that more effective."
CommonSpace is one of a handful of programs for collaborative learning that currently exist in the higher education system. Daedalus, created by professors at University of Texas, Austin, almost 10 years ago to implement their social learning theories, is used at hundreds of colleges around the world. As Daedalus spokeswoman Susan Meiss puts it, "We write to communicate ideas to other people, and in doing so get a better idea of what we're thinking."
Daedalus differs from CommonSpace in that it focuses on the writing process itself, rather than on document revision. The software uses a networked folder system rather than side-by-side notations, and also offers class chat areas, email lists, and writing lessons.
But while educators' interest has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, and especially in writing programs, Meiss says that getting students to embrace collaborative learning has been more challenging.
"It takes a while to figure out how it will manifest itself in the classroom," she says. "It means that students need to take more responsibility for learning, and some aren't comfortable with that. They like teachers to pour knowledge over them while they just sit back."
