EdTech: Bits & Bytes for May 2008

Welcome to this edition of EdTech: Bits & Bytes.

This semi- monthly newsletter from the Educational Technologist for Malaspina’s Faculty of Education is written by Julia Hengstler. (Note I’ve moved to “semi-monthly” as due to other constraints, I’ve missed a couple dates. I will try to hit the monthly mark—but will commit to semi-monthly.)  Each edition has a theme followed by a set of subject lines so you can quickly scan for topics of interest. Feedback on themes, content—or suggestions/contributions—are welcomed.  

This Month’s Theme: Collaboration, Teams & You

Today’s jobs—as never before—call for collaboration. Many times that collaboration is with people we never or rarely work with face-to-face. We all say we value collaboration—but how many of us actually collaborate with a colleague? How many of us work collaboratively in larger groups? How many of us do it well? Now before you answer those questions, think about collaboration beyond a division of labour where individuals’ work product is assembled into a larger whole. Imagine your opportunities to collaborate if you use technology to connect with people you could never work with physically. This edition focuses on defining and developing the soft skills necessary for effective collaboration and some tools that can support collaborative work.

Sections Include:

1)    What do you mean by “collaboration”?

2)    How can we be better collaborators?

3)    Some software and sites that facilitate collaboration.

What do you mean by “collaboration”?

I’m taking a page from Senge’s Schools that Learn by manifesting my understanding of collaboration here. Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary definition defines collaboration as the act of working jointly with others especially in an intellectual endeavor or cooperation with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected (http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=collaboration). At its most basic, it means working as part of a team to accomplish a task. In an ideal world, I think some group—or team—formation work is a vital upfront investment of time and effort. I realize that some issues are time-sensitive, and some work is one-item and very short term, but if you work in an school that frequently collaborates or would like to do more collaboration, the upfront investment in team building as a process can be invaluable—a social lubricant for all future efforts. It can head off friction, misinterpretation and misunderstandings that can hinder a team and create processes that become embedded in your school, district or institution. Collaboration is a discipline. Think of collaboration as team building first. Which brings me to my next section…

How can we be better collaborators?

This might as well read, “How can be better work-team members?”. Collaboration is useful not only in our work with colleagues, parents, or community members, but can be modeled and included in how we structure and prepare our classrooms. According to research, we have 3 specific needs when working in a group:

• Have a voice & be heard
• Be viewed as essential to a group
• Be seen as unique & exceptional (Cooperrider, D., 2002)

Keep those in mind when working with others. When working in a group or team, ask yourself, “How is the group meeting these needs for me? How am I helping the group meet these needs in others?”. Think about what works and what doesn’t.

Ihave been through several cohorts at the graduate level now. When I reflect upon which one had the most productive teamwork, hands-down it’s the one where we were confronted with a survival scenario that illustrated the POWER of a team versus an individual.

Survival scenarios can come as pre-packaged materials. As individuals, everyone in the group is given a life-threatening scenario and must determine how best to survive. The individual’s tactics or item selections are recorded. Individuals then get into groups and collaboratively decide how to survive. All members of the team must agree to tactics/items selected. The team’s tactics are recorded. Ultimately, the individual is scored for how well s/he would have survived and the group is scored. In most cases, the group out-performs the individual. NB: while some online examples jump right into the group work, I cannot stress enough the value of allowing individuals to complete this task alone FIRST to see how often and how much more powerful a group can be.

If you want to do-it-yourself, give all participants a scenario and an opportunity to do the selections of items/tactics AS INDIVIDUALS—with NO DISCUSSION. Next form groups of 4-5 people. Have the group come to consensus re. the items/tactics to select. If a group can’t reach consensus, the item or activity must be discarded—no exceptions. Have individuals score themselves and their groups based on the scoring guides included with the scenario. Pay attention to the scoring methods as they might be counterintuitive. For example, in the airplane crash scenario from Scouting Web (below), the LOWER your score, the more likely your survival!  If you’d rather have someone lead you through this type of activity, there are commercial products and consultants who can do this type of work.  If you’re interested in consultants, contact the nearest university with a leadership/management division. They’re sure to have good recommendations.

Links for do-it-yourself free survival scenarios

Airplane crash

Scouting Web:  http://scoutingweb.com/scoutingweb/SubPages/SurvivalGame.htm 

Lost at Sea

Careers Centre, University of Wales @ Swansea: http://www.swan.ac.uk/media/Media,3308,en.pdf 

Management & Training Development, Ltd.: http://www.training-manager.co.uk/documents/TMSS-LostatSeaExercise.pdf  

Sometimes, being a better collaborator or team member means understanding what group roles you’re comfortable with and how you and the people in your team tend to work.  Assessments can help clarify this—but are no means the final word. The Belbin Inventory looks at general group and individuals’ preferences. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality test with some pretty powerful abilities to predict behaviour. There are other types of assessments—these two are examples. There are a few major caveats when looking at these types of assessments. Caveat 1: No role or personality type is better than another—they are SIMPLY DIFFERENT. It is through understanding our differences that we can find ways to work more efficiently together and leverage our individual strengths to do better than we could ever do alone. It is also by working with others whose strengths complement our own that we are exposed to new ways to learn, work and grow. Caveat 2: No one is 100% anything, so give yourself and others room to be far more than any assessment might define. Caveat 3: These types of tools are for understanding and should NEVER be used to anyone’s detriment.

Links for group role preferences

About the Belbin Inventory from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belbin_Team_Inventory

Free Belbin Inventory from CERT Consultancy & Training

http://www.btinternet.com/~cert/freebelbin.htm

Free Belbin Self-Perception Inventory from University of Hull in the UK

http://www.hull.ac.uk/foundationaward/FE_pages/documents/BelbinSelfPerceptionInventory.doc

Links for individual behavioural preferences:

About the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator  (MBTI) from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

About the 16 Myers-Briggs Types from Personality Page

http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html

How the 16 Myers-Briggs Types Interact with Others from Personality Page—scroll down to the bottom of the page (NB: If sharing this with students, you may want to edit out the parts referring to intimate relationships)

http://www.personalitypage.com/relationships.html

Areas of Personal Growth for the 16 Types from Personality Page

http://www.personalitypage.com/personal.html

A free online MBTI test from Similar Minds

http://sminds.com/mbti/

A $5 US/person MBTI assessment

http://www.personalitypage.com/indicate.html

Once you have formed some groups, one of your first activities will likely involve discussion. Often, the best way to start a group is a check-in and if time allows—a check-out at the end of the work session. A check-in allows individuals to acknowledge their current frame of reference/feeling/experience and raises the awareness in the group that we’re all human. More than that, it gets all members to break the ice even if it’s just to say “pass”—with the belief that once you contribute something you are more likely to participate again. Following the body of this newsletter I’ve provided a handout I did for Gulf Islands Secondary on these activities in 2007. The Careers Centre at the University of Wales has posted some useful frameworks to help assess group discussion behaviour. You can look at the participation of individuals, as well as that of the overall group. These could be useful in establishing performance standards for group interactions for faculty or students. Something I’d like to explore more fully at a later date.

Links for Assessing Group Discussion Behavior

from Careers Centre, University of Wales @ Swansea:

http://www.swan.ac.uk/media/Media,3301,en.pdf

http://www.swan.ac.uk/media/Media,3312,en.pdf

http://www.swan.ac.uk/media/Media,3303,en.pdf

Some Technology Tools to Support Collaboration

Virtual Collaborative Work Areas

Below are some tools to support collaboration. If your school, district or institution is currently using a learning platform like Blackboard—or their open source free cousins like Moodle, ATutor or Sakai—many of them have numerous collaborative tools that can be added as plug-ins or turned on. If there isn’t a learning platform in use, you might want to investigate that prospect for establishing virtual collaborative workplaces.

Google Sites—a nice complement to the other free tools from Google http://sites.google.com/

Groove--bundled with MS Office 2007 Ultimate or Enterprise; can be licensed separately (check for educational pricing)

Groove site  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/FX102508951033.aspx

See article on Groove by Young Chou http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/magazine/cc160900.aspx

BSCW—stands for “Be Smart-Cooperate Worldwide”; provides collaborative workspaces for educators/schools

http://public.bscw.de/en/about.html

Social Networking as Workspace? Possibly

ELGG—has more of a social network underpinning; free

http://www.elgg.org/

Ning—free social networking

http://www.ning.com/

Web Conferencing

Elluminate—used by many public schools in British Columbia; license fees; allows you to conduct live online meetings with audio, text, and the abilities to show video clips and share PowerPoint presentation. No video-chat capabilities as yet.

http://www.elluminate.com/

Vyew—a new web conferencing/collaborative workspace; limited free use (up to about 20 participants) but you can upgrade to 100 or more for monthly fees

www.vyew.com

Dim Dim—an open source web conferencing software that will likely be integrated into Moodle; the free edition is limited to 20 participants—but you can pay to upgrade the service and features.

www.dimdim.com

Collaborative Tool Reviews

Athabasca University has a useful site reviewing various collaborative tools based on their functions—including chat, whiteboards and more

http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/

Central Queensland University in Australia has a good annotated directory of tools

http://clp.cqu.edu.au/software_tools.htm

Want more free and open source software?

If you want to learn more about free and open source software—what it is and where to find it—as well as ways to systematically pilot it, be sure to look for my upcoming chapter in a book due out from the Commonwealth of Learning, July 2008. The chapter’s working title & number were, “Entering Os: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” (Chapter 8). The working title of the book was in Education for a Digital World. The cost for the entire book should be reasonable—an you might be able to buy just the article. There’s no link to it yet, but if you’re interested just email me and I can let you know when it’s available

REFERENCE:

Cooperrider, D. 2002.  “Why Appreciative Inquiry,” Lessons from the Field: Applying Appreciative Inquiry, Bend, Oregon:Thin Book Publishing.

Thanks for reading EdTech Bits & Bytes. If you’ve enjoyed it, forward it on. Should you incorporate any of this material into your work and like to share your ideas with others, please send your experiences to the email below (Brevity in descriptions appreciated.). Also, if you have any feedback, comments or suggestions, please contact the author, Julia Hengstler.  

Julia Hengstler,

Educational Technologist

Faculty of Education, Malaspina University-College

Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada

Email: hengstlej@mala.bc.ca

Why structure collegial dialogue?

By Julia Hengstler

(Gulf Islands Secondary School, Saltspring Is., BC, Canada, 2007)

The leadership group met last week and while many people evidence collegial dialogue around the school, an explicit common framework was missing. According to research, the basic needs of people in a group are:

• Have a voice & be heard
• Be viewed as essential to a group
• Be seen as unique & exceptional (Cooperrider, D., 2002):

Making the process explicit, rather than tacitly understood, helps ensure that these needs can be effectively, and systematically met, while it also supports open, respectful dialogue in the face of collective challenges. To that end, we will be trying to formally structure group dialogue, with a facilitator and recorder for each group. Two of the dialogue structures we will use today are:

• Check-in
• Acknowledgement

Check-In

Why?

It speaks to the need for finding a voice in a group and is a best practice with a research base:

§  “It is important to formalize the norm that every person is expected to speak.” (Hammond, S. & Mayfield A., 2001, p. 41)

§  “A check-in gets everyone’s voice in a room. If everyone speaks at the beginning of a gathering, it is more likely that they will speak again… A check in helps people become aware of other people’s space, or state of mind. It helps people settle into and become focused in a meeting.” (Turner, M., 2006)

How?

 Each member of the group:

takes a turn saying a few words about whatever thoughts and feelings are moving in them at the moment…...It is acceptable to “pass” during a check-in if a person has nothing to share at the time. A check in helps people become aware of other people’s space, or state of mind. It helps people settle into and become focused in a meeting. (Turner, M., 2006)

Members of the group are able to speak without interruption.

Acknowledgement

Why?

It speaks to the need of feeling heard and is a best practice with a research base. It confirms each person’s voice at the table.

How?

After a person speaks, the subsequent speaker acknowledges the first speaker by name and one thing that the first person said that resonated with him/her. This is done before the subsequent speaker begins to speak on her/his topic.

Some Group Roles for Today:

Facilitator:

Helps group to do Check-In and prevent interruptions; guides speakers in Acknowledgement

Recorder/Reporter:

Collect information from the group & reports out to the larger group at the end of the activity.

Cooperrider, D. 2002.  “Why Appreciative Inquiry,” Lessons from the Field: Applying Appreciative Inquiry, Bend, Oregon:Thin Book Publishing.

Turner, M. 2006. “Check-In” (Hand-out). School District 70: Port Alberni, BC, Canada.