Published on 17 July 2012

My coauthors, Antonia Scheidel, Marc Schulder, and Sibel Ciddi, and I all have a new paper out recently in the 4th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies in Barcelona. It’s called Crowd sourcing the classroom: Interactive applications in higher learning, and it is available for download here, with the appropriate bib file.

Abstract

The traditional university classroom paradigm frequently leads to fragmented knowledge dispersal; each student creates, collates, and curates their own notes individually. Here, we present a more holistic approach to student participation, based on experience from a student-initiated experiment using interactive applications in higher education. We explore several methods to help university students work collaboratively: Simultaneous note-taking using an online, interactive notepad; centralised information storage using a dedicated wiki; student-run centralised storage in the cloud; and communication management using a dedicated email list. In this paper, we elaborate on these points, and draw upon relevant previous literature, as well as our experience with implementing this system in several classes with diverse subjects in a graduate level Computational Linguistics degree. We also suggest future avenues to explore, such as slide-and-note integration.

Summary

Our basic goal for this paper was to tell a story. At the beginning of the fall semester at the Saarland University, in 2011, all of the students were thrown together in a Masters program foundation course for computational linguistics. We quickly realised that some of us, who took notes by computers, could make our work more efficient by working together. Over the course of the semester, a spontaneous, organic, and collaborative way of taking notes, organising files, and managing our studies formed. At heart, there were four main devices we used for this: simultaneous online notepads, central storage on Dropbox, private class-based wikis, and email lists. None of these are necessarily new - but we felt that it was a story worth telling, and what we try to do in this paper is to present how we worked together, where we failed, and what we would suggest to teachers and students in the future. This paper is relevant, then, for not only classroom planners and education theorists, but also to students and teachers who can apply the methods used here to their own classrooms.

Note-Taking

We first discuss some details about the courses we attended, and how they were different, and each had different needs; tutorials, seminars, projects, and so on. In general, to take notes in these, we used Etherpads, based on either the Etherpad site, Riseup, Mozilla, or DataONE (which I had used the previous summer to work with, during an internship.) An Etherpad is a collaborative online notepad that allows multiple users to edit a document simultaneously, and has a chat bar, basic formatting functionality, and stores data for 30 days from the last edit. We basically used one Etherpad to store all of the links to the others, and every day we would check into that, open a new one, paste the link, and start taking notes. Other students in on it would start taking notes at the same time, and our work was cut in half. As well, this gave us the opportunity to see what was important to others, what questions we might have, to share personal notes about the course or anything else, and also the opportunity to ask a question, and listen, instead of scrambling to take notes simultaneously. It worked very well. We go over a lot of the gritty details, as well as show a textual analysis of the type of notes - links, personal comments, slide transcriptions, and so on.

Wiki

One of our courses had a dedicated MediaWiki that we used to share information about the course itself, a reading list, slides from our presentations, information about the topic, as well as links to notebooks. It wasn’t the largest wiki - 18 pages in the end - but it did work very well as a reference which we could edit, rather than a closed site that only a secretary somewhere can edit.

Dropbox and Email Lists

For each course in the program, there was a centralised email list that could be used to talk among other students. Usage patterns differed - for some courses, the lists were barely used. For others, there were often emails several times a week. The topics of conversation varied widely: administration details, homework assignments and questions, requests for papers that were held behind paywalls, questions about specific lectures, mentions of relevant books or research outside of the syllabus, and so on. For the entire program, there was also a centralised list that was used for larger concerns, such as examination procedures.

As well, in response to early inefficient practices of repeatedly forwarding multiple copies of papers and homework assignments, a centralised Dropbox was set up to gather all of the information in one place. By the time we published, the Dropbox held 814 files, and was 1.07 GB in size. That’s a lot. There were dozens of relevant articles, answer sheets, past examinations, and notes. Dropbox was chosen because it was free, easy to use, easily synced to the master storage unit in the cloud, easy to moderate (both to allow members and to ensure quality), and because it had version control (for instance, when someone accidentally deleted a file, it could be recalled.) The majority of the students in the department had access to the Dropbox, except a few who had minor security issues, or did not wish to share files with others. We also, for some assignments, used a Github.

We then go on to discuss, in more detail, each of the topics, before moving on to give our final recommendations. Here’s that section, verbatim.

Recommendations

So, from our experiences, we have several overarching recommendations for future students and teachers regarding how to maximise the use of the four methods described above:

  1. Spend time after lectures, or during lulls in conversation, to make the notes readable and more structured. This leads to a better understanding of the material both during the lecture and for later reference.
  2. Communicate with lecturers about the use of slides being uploaded before a class. We found that does help significantly with following along. It also helps with note-taking, exporting to different documents and formats, and provides an impetus to prepare for lectures so that extra information can be garnished from the instructor instead of merely following the slides at the front of a class. Page numbers, sign-posting, and overview slides are especially helpful.
  3. Short breaks between sections during a class can be incredibly helpful, even if they seem redundant and counter-productive. They allow students to mull over new thoughts, and to structure their notes and their understanding.
  4. Make sure that someone archives and collates the notes together in a central repository, so that collaborative work is not lost (for instance, due to the 30-day use limit to the Etherpads). crowdsourcing quality assurance and checking the repository is also much easier than having one individual doing this alone.
  5. Keep systems simple and straightforward to encourage people to contribute regularly. Complicated processes and interfaces inhibit students, by causing them to spend the extra effort in an already intense study environment. The more seamlessly collaboration can be integrated into daily routine, the better.

We hope that these recommendations help with future classes. Another aspect, not mentioned so far in this paper, that makes collaborative work suitable for classrooms is that it is very engaging, and in some cases, fun - more so than following a single lecturer without interacting with fellow students.

Conclusion

So, that was basically our paper. None of us could attend the conference for logistical reasons, but we hope that it got our there, and that some people take the time to look at the paper, and perhaps implement Classroom 2.0 technologies in their universities or high schools. Would be fun.

Feel free to email me or comment here for questions.