Sent to you by DavidAndrew via Google Reader:
I'm not someone who does a lot of in-class group work, where "group work" is understood as clusters of 2-5 students in a class with at least 20. Most of them do such work outside of class, whether in a wiki, or on blogs, or some other electronic space. I have always mistrusted group work, both as a student and as a faculty member, because I always feel left out: Whatever's going on in some other group is inherently more interesting. Plus, it's hard to generate a sense of common intellectual work in small groups: For example, if you're building toward a midterm or final, then the group work has to be fairly carefully designed in order to make sure it's useful. You can ask groups to report out on their work, but in a 50 minute class, it's hard to find time for both the task and the reporting.
A combination of technical solutions has helped me get over the hump a little bit, by introducing both easy accountability and transparency of the small group to the class as a whole. Here's how it works:
- As I've posted before, all my classes are organized around a wikified class notes, so students already accustomed to documenting the work of the class. So, if we're doing group work, I'll simply ask someone from each group to post their results to the wiki.
- I used to have trouble following up on group work, in part because the groups are always ad hoc. I'd sometimes remember to scribble down who was in what group, but more usually I'd forget. Now, I take a picture of the class with my phone while they're working. (Obviously, not for posting to Flickr or Facebook or anything. Just to follow-up about the work.
- Mobile- and smartphones make it easier to incorporate group work into the class, too. Groups can tweet their findings to a class account, for example. I also have an e-mail account to which students send in-class work, either for displaying on the multimedia station or for immediate transfer to the wiki. (Still can't edit the wiki natively on the iPhone/iPod.) In classes with large numbers of iPods/iPhones I'll frequently ask students to install free mindmap software in order to quickly represent some idea or chunk of text, and then export the results to the class e-mail account.
None of these are transformational–that is, they're not the most powerful uses of mobile computing one could imagine. But they're easy-to-implement, and yield legitimate payoffs in showing that group work is meaningful to the overall trajectory of the class.
So: How do you make small groups work for you? (Non-technological solutions welcome! Principled rejections of group work are, too!)
Image by flickr user Lisavanovitch / CC licensed
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to ProfHacker.com using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
