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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Thursday 28 April 2011 meeting was productive, and personally educational. With Linda away, Liz and Roger guided the group's effort to identify courses which can be taught collaboratively and/or through projects. The group used the sticky blue board (hereafter SBB) to support this exercise.
On large index cards, each member wrote down topics/learning objectives from an example course in his/her field. The index cards would be placed on the SBB classified by (i) collaborative to independent, and (ii) project based to independent. Initially, Liz organized the SBB so that largely collaborative and project based topics would be placed on the respective edges, with the independent topics overlapping in the middle. Perhaps foolishly, I suggested that we change the SBB organization so that collaborative and project based topics would overlap in the middle of the SBB, with the independent topics on the edges. I made this suggestion so the group could easily identify topics that are both collaborative and project based. However, my suggestion did not allow for an easy identification of the independent/independent topics.

While we conducted the exercise using my suggested organization, I was not happy unable to simultaneously identify topics that overlapped as both collaborative/projects and independent/independent. I suggested that we consider alternative methods to visually identify natural groupings. The group suggested several alternatives, and Roger asked the group to investigate alternative organizations.

I like doing research. I don't mind sorting through 75 abstracts to find 2-4 papers that are tacitly related to the perceived topic area. In the end, I found two experimental papers loosely related to what I was looking for. Each paper contained examples of different SBB organizational structures, including one that Chance had suggested!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks Samuel. I think you did a great job of explaining out SBB process.

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