Info
Writing a chapter to an electronic handbook in international collaboration
During this collaboration the students will form international teams to collaboratively write a chapter to an electronic handbook for educators. Related to the book chapter, the students will also create a presentation with PREZI.
The students should collect data in the field, capturing the real-life practice to be used as a foundation for the chapter. Students will use their mobile phones and/or other mobile devices to collect photos, videos or other materials that can be embedded to their book chapter. Students are supposed to use any creative ways to construct their book chapter and enrich it with different ways of presenting ideas and knowledge.
The aim of this collaboration is to share expertise between students from different fields and backgrounds to solve a problem (scenario given in the chapter). When writing the book chapters, students will use the theoretical knowledge gained in their earlier studies and local implementations of this course.
Implementation
Writing will be implemented in international teams that have students from all the three participating universities. Each team has a tutor to falicilate their collaboration during the course.
The teams will start their collaboration in a meeting in Adobe Connect on Monday 15th October. The times of the meetings are mentioned in the chapters’ wiki pages. After this meeting the team can choose their own working methods and environments and schedule their own meetings. The wiki is suitable for collaborative writing and discussion, but the team can choose also other tools to write and collect information.
The book chapters will be reviewed three times by a teacher and once by a team of peers. The reviewing times are the following:
Monday 22nd Oct – Teacher review & comments
Monday 29th Oct – Teacher review & comments
Week 45– Peer review (the instructions can be found in this page under the headline "peer review").
Monday 12th Nov – Teacher review & comments
The text will be reviewed as such as it is at these points in the wiki page. If a team does their writing in some other environment, in order to get reviewed the text has to be in wiki at the time of the reviewing. The comments of the reviewer will be posted on the wiki page's discussion area by the end of the following tuesday.
On week 44 students will be peer reviewing other team’s book chapter based on the evaluation criteria and instructions that will be published later on this page.
The outcomes of this collaboration will be presented to others with Prezi-presentations in joint ending seminar on Thursday 15th November at 10-12 (Nor) / 11-13 (Fin/Est) in AdobeConnect: http://connectpro.oulu.fi/letopinnot1
The book chapters should be finalized by the end of the same week (week 46 / 18th Nov)
Evaluation
The collaboratively constructed products (Book chapters and Prezis) will be reviewed and evaluated by the following criteria:
- Does the contribution address the core challenges of the scenario and provide a potential solution for them?
- Is the contribution innovative/creative or does it simply re-use existing solutions?
- Are the challenges addressed by considering different perspectives?
- Are the perspectives and competencies of the international participants brought together into a coherent contribution?
- Is the contribution properly grounded in current knowledge in learning theories and supported by meaningful cooperation technologies and potential interactions?
- Is the contribution clearly presented and organized?
- Is the contribution presented with meaningful/appropriate media?
Peer review
During week 45 (Mon 5th – Fri 9th November) every team will review other team’s book chapter. The review’s will be done as a team and the comments should be posted to the discussion area of the evaluated chapter (the same way as the earlier reviews).
Team 1 reviews chapter 2
Team 2 reviews chapter 3
Team 3 reviews chapter 4
Team 4 reviews chapter 5
Team 5 reviews chapter 6
Team 6 reviews chapter 7
Team 7 reviews chapter 1
Through this peer evaluation you will not only provide input to another group to improve their work, but you will also:
• Be introduced to another group's work, which can help you to reflect on your own work
• Familiarize with the evaluation criteria that are used to assess the handbook chapters
Remember the other team will use your feedback to improve their work, so be constructive and think how you can help the team by pointing out strengths and weaknesses of the work and give concrete indications about how the chapter can be improved. Make sure that in writing your evaluation you mobilize the competencies of all the team members so that you provide feedbacks that cover all the aspects of the project
Provide your feedbacks using the criteria below:
- Does the contribution address the core challenges of the scenario and provide a potential solution for them?
- Is the contribution innovative/creative or does it simply re-use existing solutions?
- Are the challenges addressed by considering different perspectives?
- Are the perspectives and competencies of the international participants brought together into a coherent contribution?
- Is the contribution properly grounded in current knowledge in learning theories and supported by meaningful cooperation technologies and potential interactions?
- Is the contribution clearly presented and organized?
- Is the contribution presented with meaningful/appropriate media?
Other instructions and links
Tutorials and manuals for PREZI
To find relevant information for your scenario you could use:
1. Google Scholar http://scholar.google.fi/
2. Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
3. All the electronical services provided by your university library and the expertise of the library staff
4. Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ (that will also lead you to more official resources).
You should discuss with your team members about what would be the relevant keywords you could use when finding information - What are the key concepts in your scenario?