7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 10:00am Introduction to Collaboration: A Collaborative Introduction
Speaker: Erin DeSilva, Instructional Technology Specialist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Why do faculty members assign collaborative writing projects? This session will set the stage for the day by examining learning objectives, anecdotes and data regarding the benefits and costs to these assignments. Participants will be invited to share their challenges, ideas and questions. Examples may include team dynamics, technological support, reference management, division of labor, editing, and more.

10:00am - 10:15am Break

10:15am – 12:00pm Web 2.0 Tools in the Classroom: Do They Help or Hinder the Collaborative Writing Process?
Speaker: Lauren Mathews, Associate Professor, Biology & Biotechnology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Various electronic platforms, including interactive Web 2.0 tools, can be used to facilitate collaborative academic projects, including writing assignments, and their use in this context is increasing. But do such technological tools help or hinder the collaborative process, and what is their impact on student progress towards achieving learning objectives? In this presentation, I will describe my initial attempts to answer these questions, using an undergraduate-level general ecology course as a model. I will present data on how teams collaborated both with and without technological tools, and evaluate the impacts of technological tool use on the progress students made in developing skills in hypothesis testing and experimental design, which are key components of the course. I will also provide an introduction to the alternative technological tools that we evaluated in this process, and provide some guidelines on the functionality of each. Finally, I will comment on my progress towards my next objective, which is to generalize these approaches to collaborative activities in other courses and in academic work outside the classroom.

12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch

1:00pm – 2:45pm Training Writers to Use Collaborative Tools Effectively — and Humanely
Speaker: Karen Kuralt, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Because of workplace trends such as telecommuting, distributed offices, and global marketing, today’s college graduates will almost certainly be required to collaborate online at some point in their professional careers. Students must learn to evaluate the pros and cons of different collaborative technologies so they can choose the best tool for specific collaborative situations. But perhaps more importantly, students need to be prepared for ways that collaborating through technology may present greater challenges than collaborating in person. They need specific instruction in developing a team workflow, communication practices, and conflict resolution procedures in online settings. Without this support, online collaborations can turn ugly fast. I will draw on my experiences teaching an all-online graduate course in collaborative writing for the past three years, as well as my experience consulting with a toxicology company that uses extensive online collaboration, to illustrate some of the problems that students and employees are surprised by when they work together online. The solutions require not just using the right tools in the best ways, but remembering that team members still need to treat each other humanely even when they interact through computer screens.

2:45pm - 3:00pm Q&A, Next Steps, Wrap-up