Thanks for the comment! The issues of supporting students as they learn to engage in collaborative activities is important. We’re approaching this from a number of directions:
1) Analyzing video of groups as they work together over time, to see what sort of skills they develop (we’ll have a CSCL poster about this in June).
2) Working with the teaching assistants to help them learn how to support students in their collaborative interactions.
3) Exploring if there are features in the tool that can be used to prompt better collaborative interactions.

Great, I’ll be excited to hear what you find out— sounds like it will be really useful!

Technology is essential for some of what we’re doing – and not necessary for other parts of it. Yes, of course, providing students with larger pieces of paper would allow them to create larger sketches – and likely share them within their group more easily. However, the technology allows us to do a wider range of things such as
- let the TA see what each group is working on
- easily share work with the whole class
- allow a student to work on a small sketch, that can then be enlarged to share with the group
- potentially ‘play back’ a sketch process, allowing students and instructors to talk about their process.
- potentially use sketch recognition technology to alert TAs to problems the students are having, or at least, identify groups whose sketches aren’t going to help them solve the problem.
We’re spending a lot of time thinking about what in means to engage in collaborative problem solving within a classroom – and creating tools to support learning beyond the interaction that occurs within the small group – which is where the technology really comes into its own.

We’re working on this! Next year, we’ll be working with the TAs to help them learn how to teach the students to collaborate (drawing on prior research on collaboration, and also the data we collected of the students collaborating this year). There certainly has to be more to this project (and the entire endeavor of introducing collaborative tasks to engineering courses) than giving students technology and telling them to collaborate. Learning good collaborative practices is an essential piece of the puzzle.

Motivation is a mixed issue – the tasks are group tasks, so they have to work in groups in their classes. But, motivating them to engage in joint knowledge construction and to care about what their teammates learn requires some support, and the type of classroom climate where learning is prioritized over task completion, and all students see themselves as part of the learning community.

Thanks Robert – we’re excited about the potential of this tool to support the collaborative practice of creating shared representations in a range of contexts too!