Collaborative Sites
A DIY digital learning environment that scaled up to become an interactive, student-centered platform serving 40 classes and 1,300+ students.
Looking back, I feel so fortunate to have worked for the L&S Learning Support Services (LSS) team at UW-Madison right at the dawn of Web 2.0. We were experimenting with Drupal and wikis internally, and, at the time, we shared an overall optimism about the potential for community building online. My background was in language instruction and critical pedagogy, and I kept seeing the same possibility: the student-centered classroom I knew, where authentic language use and genuine community drove learning, didn’t have to stop at the classroom door. What if we could partner with faculty to design the online and face-to-face learning environments together, with each one amplifying student voices and perspectives?
Together with the team at LSS, I worked through the technical aspects of this question, learning how to set up and configure Drupal sites, develop custom content types, and create coherent, navigable user experiences for learners. At the same time, I was partnering with faculty and graduate student teaching assistants, collaborating on the emerging pedagogy of hybrid instruction models, and figuring out how online learning could deepen ties between students.
The result was “Collaborative Sites,” a DIY learning environment that we scaled up to serve over 40 classes and 1,300 students. Each site felt fully customized and tailored to the particular class, while running on the same scalable infrastructure behind the scenes. Three examples from the many sites we built show the breadth and range of student engagement pedagogy supported by the platform.
e-Diario
With Renée Anne Poulin and Tom Cravens’s Italian 203 students, we built the “e-Diario,” a micro-blogging platform where short updates and photo sharing gave students approachable entry points to genuine connection outside the classroom, in the language they were learning. At the end of the semester, 100% of survey respondents across 5 sections said the e-Diario had improved their Italian writing. Ninety-four percent said it helped them think across cultures. We had a hunch that the mix of personally meaningful writing and community sharing would make a difference for intermediate language learners. The pilot results were strong enough that we scaled the project to all sections the following semester.
The Garden
“The Garden,” built for Rania Huntington’s East Asian Literature course around Hong Lou Meng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, featured a word cloud on the homepage built from the tags students created as they wrote. At the start of the semester, there was very little to see. As students contributed reflective writing, thematic investigations, and literary analysis throughout the semester, the cloud grew, accumulating visible proof of the knowledge students were building together and the cross-connections between their ideas. Prof. Huntington called it “the most fun I’ve ever had teaching with courseware.”
Mexican Migration Portfolio
Alfonso Morales’s students in Chicano Studies built the “Mexican Migration Portfolio (MMP)” together, collaboratively creating a glossary of key terminology sourced from student’s own personal experiences and reflective responses to course readings and topics. A student described what happened as the difference between thinking on your feet and thinking on the page: “Class discussions are valuable but much of the thinking is off the cuff, whereas on the MMP questions and responses can be more thoroughly thought out.”
It was a very exciting time to be in learning technology and at LSS. We were running our own server infrastructure in a former supply closet. Graduate students and instructors passionate about their teaching brought energy, ideas, and new opportunities each semester. The team’s technical support made the infrastructure possible while I was still developing those skills myself. Our leadership encouraged and made room for experimentation. Each semester we expanded to new instructors and new departments: doing outreach, presenting impact, understanding new pedagogical needs, and figuring out how to balance scalability with the customization that made each site feel like it belonged to its course.
For me, the technical learning was substantial: Drupal, content management, user experience design, and coding for an open-source web application were all areas I was figuring out as we went. Even deeper was my education in building and scaling a service through genuine partnership, one course and one conversation at a time. A scrappy, DIY pilot project eventually reached 40 courses and 1,300 students across a dozen departments. Collaborative Sites taught me that the adjacent possible expands when you keep showing up, keep asking what’s working for learners, and keep making room for the next course, the next instructor, the next idea.
Presentations on Collaborative Sites
Worsham, D. (2005, June). Making Wikis Work. Foreign Language Education and Technology. http://fleat5.byu.edu/_files/17Worsham.pdf
Worsham, D. (2007a, May 30). Social Networking and Remix Culture. UW Madison Teaching & Learning Symposium.
Worsham, D. (2007b, June 21). Wikis in Language Learning: Audience, Authorship, and Assessment. International Association of Language Learning Technology.
Worsham, D. (2011, June 23). Collaborative Sites for Language, Literature, and Culture. International Association for Language Learning Technology. https://www.iallt.org/thursday_june_23
Worsham, D., & Chinn, G. (2009, November 5). Creating Custom Online Learning Environments with Drupal [Poster Presentation]. EDUCAUSE 2009. http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2009/creating-custom-online-learning-environments-drupal
Worsham, D., Cramer, R., & Bundy, B. (2007, October 23). Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts: Personal Authoring Technologies Enrich Communication and Expression for You and Your Students [Full-day seminar]. EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference. http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2007/seminar-03f-blogs-wikis-and-podcasts-personal-authoring-technologies-enrich-communication-and-expressi
Worsham, D., Dugdale, T., & Schmidt, L. (2010, January 20). Collaborative Conundrum: What We Know About Group Work and Technology, but Often Forget. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. http://net.educause.edu/ELI10/Program/1022371?PRODUCT_CODE=ELI10/SESS12
Worsham, D., & Shawl, L. (2009, February 26). Moving Toward Student-Centered Learning with Collaborative Technologies. Symposium for Teaching and Learning Excellence. http://www.minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/35054?show=full
Worsham, D., Shorter, C., & Goddard, T. (2011, June 16). Knowledge Building for the Digital Humanities. New Media Consortium Summer Conference. http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011/2011_NMC_Summer_Conference_Program.pdf