October 2000 — Features

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Creating a Pre-Service Teachers' Virtual Space

By Julie Reinhart, Tiffany Anderson and Joseph Slowinski

Issues in Design and Development of Cross-Country Collaboration

Overview of the Project

The virtual collaboration project began with the desire of the three authors to create a learning environment that would operate as a catalyst to promote student collaboration on Web-based projects in their respective “Computers in Education” courses. At the time, the authors were instructors at three different universities, two in Indiana and one in North Carolina. The objective was to create a project in which our students engaged in meaningful, virtual interactions through the discussion of computer-related topics in education.

We agreed to facilitate student interactions by placing the project in a more authentic context: a problem-based learning environment. Students were asked to envision themselves as participatory members of the 21st Century Teachers Network (www.21ct.org). They were given the following professional responsibilities, as stated by this organization: to build their own expertise in using new learning technologies; to share their expertise and experience with colleagues; to use their expertise with students as part of the daily learning process; and to work to make classroom technology available to all students and teachers.

Over the course of the semester, students worked in groups comprised of individuals from each campus. They were asked to read articles related to five areas of educational technology: equity, acceptable use, software evaluation, technology funding and integrating technology. Each member of a group was given a different article to read, and was entrusted with the responsibility of summarizing the content for his or her group mates. After completion of the summaries for each area, the group collaborated to develop a shared statement on that issue. This statement was intended to capture the issues from each article, along with the group’s own sentiment. To accomplish this, students collaborated via e-mail and an asynchronous Web-based communication tool.

 

Design and Development Issues

What follows is a discussion of the design and development process we used during our collaboration project. Prior to the analysis and development of a virtual collaboration project, an individual must propose an idea to colleagues as the catalyst of the project. This initiative began with a simple e-mail based on a desire to collaborate:

 

Hi all,

I’ll be teaching a section of Computers in Education at IUN this semester and was wondering if anyone there was interested in a collaborative project between courses? I’ve got lots of ideas that we could start brainstorming.