T21-5 Stimulus

Andrew Carnegie said, "No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it." In today's workplaces, there is a need for a wide variety of skills and perspectives and communication and collaboration skills are necessary to facilitate the utilization of these skills and perspectives. The benefits of collaboration apply to both teachers and students and it is likely that teachers who collaborate will be better placed to plan collaborative activities for their students.

You will notice that this week there are more resources than we can do justice to in the time available. Try to include at least 2 resources from the first set below, dealing with the benefits of collaboration and a good sampling from the second set dealing with the tools for collaboration. You may notice that Google docs are not mentioned here even though they are excellent tools for collaboration. That is because we will focus on Google docs in our Implement section this week.

Collaboration as an Educational Activity

1. Lupton, E. (2005) Why Collaborate? This short article begins, “I’d love to collaborate, as long as I can work alone.”
2. McLure, C (2008) The Benefits of Teacher Collaboration. District Administration: The Magazine of School District Management.
3. CTER (2009) Teacher Collaboration. This document seems to have disappeared so this gives a good opportunity to find it in the Wayback Machine (web archive). First right click the URL and copy the link location. Then go to the Wayback Machine and look for the box with "http://" in it. You need to delete the http:// because we are going to paste the URL for the missing link and we don't want http:// appearing twice. Click Take me Back and click the most recent date with a circle which indicates a copy of the missing website. If you don't have any luck, here is the link to the missing article.
   
4. Karrer, T (2006) Brief Overview of Collaborative Learning.
5. Ashford, E. (2009) Small-group collaboration: Technology facilitates learning in small groups.
6. National Institute for Science Education (1997) Doing CL. If you have not had much experiencing with collaborative learning, this site will give you plenty of ideas. Note that it is a site, not a single page.

Tools for Communication and Collaboration
The remaining articles have a more practical emphasis and focus on the tools to enhance collaboration.

1. Wikis.
   Jenkens, H (2006) Teaching in a Participatory Culture. Slideshare presentation.
2. Mind mapping
   Mindmapping.com (2012)  Mind Mapping in Education.
   Tools for brainstorming and mind mapping Bubbl.us and Freemind
   More Graphic Organizers
   techbytes (2007) Bubbl.us Basics: Brainstorming and Mind-mapping Online
   Freemind Tutorial
3. Social Bookmarking:
   Lefever, L. (2007) Social Bookmarking in Plain English (3 min video)
   diigobuzz (2008) Diigo V3: Highlight & Share the Web! Social Bookmarking 2.(Youtube video)
   
4. Johnson, D.(2009) Computing in the Cloud. Learning and Leading
5. Glimpses into the future
   a) Google + has been described as Google's attempt to take some of the territory dominated by Facebook but Liz Dwyer thinks there is much more - Why Google+ Is an Education Game Changer.
   b) Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada V., Freeman, A., and Ludgate, H. (2013). NMC Horizon Report: 2013 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
   The Horizon Reports comes from a "research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations." For the purposes of this class it would be find to read just the executive summary rather than the full page document.

On the lighter side ... have you every heard of Wikiality? This short video from July 2006 may enlighten you and provide some food for thought. It may also raise some interesting issues about the nature of truth and credibility. From The Colbert Report.