L&S Collaborative Sites
The L&S Collaborative Sites platform helps instructional technology consultants build custom online collaboration environments. These environments support both the collaborative authoring and editing you see in wikis, and the "post-comment-post" interaction of blogs.
LSS has piloted the Collaborative Sites platform in several L&S courses, creating custom online learning environments that support multiple types of interaction, including group authorship and consensus building, class glossaries, knowledge repositories, course portfolios, student journals, and literary analysis sites.
Examples include:
- Chicano Studies/Sociology 470: Alfonso Morales' students worked together to create a course portfolio, including a glossary of key terminology, responses to course readings, and posts on topics and issues in the course. In an end of semester survey, one student wrote that the Mexican Migration Portfolio (MMP) "gave students a chance to interact with one another at a different level of discourse. Class discussions are valuable but much of the thinking is off the cuff, whereas on the MMP questions and responses can be more thoroughly thought out."
- East Asian Languages and Literature 371: "The Garden" is a collaborative online reading notebook, built around a central metaphor of the course text - a garden. Rania Huntington's students built, cultivated, and maintained the interactive space while they explored Hong Lou Meng's classic of Chinese Literature, Dream of the Red Chamber. Huntington says, "It's the most fun I've ever had teaching with courseware."
- Italian 203: Renée Anne Poulin and Tom Cravens combined elements of blogging, photo-blogging, and social-networking software to facilitate communication between students and with instructors outside of class time. In an end of semester survey on the "e-Diario" project, 100% of survey respondents said that the project helped them improve their Italian writing skills, 94% agreed that the project helped them make comparisons between their own culture and Italian culture, and 84% of respondents said the site was easy to use. (Response rate was 86% across five course sections.)
For more information:
- To get started on your own L&S Collaborative Site, email Doug Worsham (doug@lss.wisc.edu) or Sue Weier (sue@lss.wisc.edu)
- For more detailed information on the L&S Collaborative Sites platform, read our case study
