Interactivity #3

I entered Interactivity #3 with definite reservations. My experience with online collaboration from a previous web based class that I eventually dropped, gave me an idea of  what I perceived would happen with this: people would do their work, and no actual collaboration would take place.

Unfortunately, that's what basically happened with our group, although I did have some contact with a couple of the members via e-mail, our conversations were not really directed towards the assignment. It was mostly in regards to everyone's status due to Hurricane Sandy.  I think we were all too preoccupied with recovering than collaborating. I know I was. When I did get to a relative's house that had power and internet, I accessed the spreadsheet and saw that everybody had made their inputs. That did leave me with a fairly daunting task, which was to find stuff they had not. Difficult, but after what seemed like days, I finally got it done. 

I think that our inventory definitely provided some good technologies that we can use. I'm personally using a couple of them currently, and have used a few of the others in classes or lesson planning in the recent past. 

I am convinced that online collaboration is viable. I'm a member of a couple of organizations that regularly collaborate online with documents or projects, and I do contribute to those or at least comment on their progress, but that is often done through a forum or regular e-mail list. I wonder how we can make that willing voluntary participation work for students who are assigned groups and are basically forced to participate?  Somehow we either need to incentivize it better, or transfer the  ownership to the students so they believe it is all of their doing, and not something we're making them do.

Something to think about.