Communication Tools
for Online Collaboration
A Companion to the Presentation made by
Dr. Thomas
Treadwell
A presentation at the American
Psychological Association's
1999 Miniconvention on Education and Technology
Paula Edmiston
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Collaborating Online
Collaborating online presents special problems in communication. Since
people cannot meet face to face, but must share access to documents and
searches, a framework for online communication is necessary. Sometimes the
collaborators need to share text and other documents.
The most popular method of online communication is email, but this
collaborative group decided early in the program that webboards would be
used as the formal medium for student and faculty communication. Since
the students were working in a very specific time frame (the academic
calendar), their motivation to visit and interact with the webboard was
high, and the use of the web-based discussion was successful.
THe major problem in using he Internet has been the variable experience of
the members of the project. Among both the students and teachers are
people with skills ranging from to high level abilities to use software,
to those who have just begun to use the Internet and need a great deal of
help to learn the class tools. This has caused a certain level of
frustration among those who find additional, unexpected amounts of time
have to be devoted just to learn how to use the tools necessary to
communicate with other about the primary material they've come together to
learn.
Overview of the tools used
This collaborative group has seen an evolution in the tools used to
support online communication. Initially a web-based discussion board was
implemented to provide interaction rather than
email. Students were so new
to the concept of the Internet that it was felt offering a discussion area
that was independent of email would facilitate their exchanges. The
advantage of the webboard over email lay primarily in the fact that any
web browser could provide the access they needed. The problems surrounding
acquiring and configuring email programs, unstable email accounts and the
difficulties in exchanging documents across platforms were considered too
great for immediate productivity. So, rather than try to teach myriad
email programs to the students (with their associated routines for reply,
forward, etc) we decided to use a webboard so that all students would be
learning the same interface to the discussions area.
Eventually the students were introduced to Athenaeum, an academic
talker. The talk site made it possible for both students and professors to
meet together in real time to discuss the research being conducted and to
review the documents they were creating.
A series of web-based calendars were provided to assist in scheduling
meetings and deadlines.
Acquisition and Installation of the Tools
Matt's WWWboard, the original calendar, and the talker code are freely
available at archives and FTP sites. There is a small charge ($50) for the
current calendar but we felt it was well worth the fee for the powerful
configuration routines.
I usually meet with Dr. Treadwell at Athenauem to talk him through
installations and archiving, but on occasion he gives me telnet access
into his site so I can work on the files alone. Other times I'll place
step-by-step instructions on a message board in Athenaeum to give him more
permanent documentation for maintenance tasks. See the message board in
the Athenauem office for a series of instructions for archiving a board.
- Webboards
- For years we've used the WWWBoard from
Mat's Script Archives.
This is a free script that is moderately difficult to install and
configure.
Four boards are installed each semester: one for each student group
(boards One - three) and a board for faculty discussion.
While WWWboard doesn't come with a module to archive discussions, we
worked out a
webboard archival system, using a patern of subdirectiories under
each group directory. The boards were initially istalled in
directories, "group1", "group2", "group3", "group4" the last, group4,
was the board for faculty discussion). Subdirectories were created
under each of these, first for years (1999, 1998, etc) and within the
years, often divided into months or quarters (we were a little
inconsistant here!). The board scripts with their "messages"
subdirectories, were moved into the archive directories.
We wanted, but haven't found in Matt's or any other web board script, a
method of archiving to a database that could be used to analyze the
discussions.
As you can see in the Group 1, Spring 99 WWWboard the discussions were lively and indepth (link removed
12/12/2007).
A number of other web-based discussion boards were tried in the summer of
1999 but none met the needs of the collaborative group as well as Matt's
boards. We looked at WebX, but found it awkward to use, difficult to customize and frustrating to
learn. We tried WebBoard, one of the better alternatives. WebBoard is similar to WebX in one's
ability to customize and individual user profile. It's modules to return
and edit existing posts and the spell checker were its strongest features.
It's a trade-off: the advanced features made it more difficult to learn to
use and even today many of the students in these courese have little to no
experience with Internet tools (other than the relatively passive link
clicking of the World Wide Web). So once again we searched for another
script. The last script we tried was Discus, a free script that allows for personal user customization,
spell
checking but no editing of existing posts. Again we felt the advanced
features were more difficult to adapt to than the return of better
interactivity with the script.
And so we returned to Matt's scripts.
- Calendar
- We started out using WebCal from Extropia, a
pretty good, free calendar for groups.
See the Spring
99 Group One Calendar for March as an example of entries made.
We recently switched to Lozinski's
Calendar. Although it costs $50.00, it's well worth the purchase
price! One can create as many calendars as necessary and the web-based
configuration routine makes setting up the individual calendars very
convenient. This is a moderately difficult script to install, and as far
as I can tell, can't be installed in an account with a tilde! The
calendars will be used for this first time this fall, 1999. You can see an
example of a group
calendar not yet in use.
- Talker
- The
Athenaeum Talker was used by both students and faculty. A room was
built, the Collaboratorium, for the group. Students met here to work out
assignments and writing tasks and faculty used the site, both to work with
students and each other. Athenaeum is based on NUTS, a C program that runs
in a UNIX environment.
The NUTS program is freely available at ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/mud/servers/misc/nuts
and is moderately difficult to install and configure. This program is
accessible via a telnet program, or through a java gate that runs in a web
browser. The java gate in use is Cup O Mud, available at
http://www.du.org/java/CupOmud/
|
1994 - 2008
Paula Edmiston
