Borderland

Graham calls it a grassroots collaboration. And that, it is. He set up a wiki last August called Spin the Globe. It’s a web space where his class and mine can hopefully learn from each other about our respective far-flung parts of the world. Graham gave it a fair review, but I haven’t had a lot to say about it because it hasn’t really come together for me and my group yet. But we’re getting there, and now, since Paul Allison invited me and Graham to discuss it this evening on the Teachers Teaching Teachers podcast, I’m sorting through my reactions to the project so far.

Going into it, I expected a lot of details would need to be hammered out on the fly, and that’s how it’s been, which is OK. Most projects involve making adjustments, and having someone else to bounce ideas off of has been OK. Graham’s been easy to work with. I’m not so sure about me, though.

I’m not a good collaborator. I like to do things on my own, in my own time, and in my own way. So when Graham needed input from my kids to move the project along, I wasn’t as responsive as I might have been. I was busy with other, more immediate needs in my own classroom and couldn’t always arrange my time to jump in as needed. It’s not that I don’t try to coordinate my schedule with the demands of the situation, but I don’t try as hard as I probably could, which makes me a less than optimum choice for a partner. I tend to not get involved in situations with other people where scheduling my participation is vital.

Early in our school year, when we joined the project, my students knew nothing about me, or wikis, or much of anything important that I wanted them to know. Graham’s kids had been working together for months. The time required for me to get my group rolling was a roadblock for his kids, I think.

I didn’t always see the need for us to depend on each other. To my way of thinking, we can collaborate in a number of ways, using a number of platforms, each on our own timeline. I don’t think we need to limit ourselves to the wiki, either. As I see it, we can use it for a “home base” and set up other things like blogs, flickr, and del.icio.us accounts to share photos and links, which we did.

The project focus has been a little broad. The wiki is set up so the kids can learn more about each other’s home regions. But the Fairbanks kids don’t know a lot about parts of Alaska that are remote from their experience. And I think the same can be said about the Adelaide kids. There is some comically wrong stuff about Alaska in the wiki, and yesterday some of my kids started working on revisions, which is one of the great things about using a wiki, that it allows for that kind of participation. They’re also adding new pages about stuff they’re interested in, and making decisions about the subject matter that’s included.

As the kids were working on the project yesterday, I noticed that many of them wanted to partner up and work in teams on different pages, and I realized that the collaboration doesn’t need to be confined to the wiki. The collaboration involved in figuring out how to locate and post photos, how to find relevant information elsewhere, and how to avoid accidentally overwriting someone else’s edit are all examples of informal teamwork that happens going in.

As for classroom web collaborations in general, I’m doing this with Graham as a kind of an experiment. I don’t see it as the best way for the kids to learn to write, but I do think it can help them learn to fact-check, and to see things from another person’s point of view. In some ways, it’s happening backward from what you’d expect in a real-life situation. People don’t usually decide to work together, and then think of something to do. But then, this is school, and that’s kind of how it is with everything we do in school. I don’t mind in this case. But it would be better, I think, if we began with local real-world projects, and documented them. And we can still do that, too.