Recent releases

Monday October 3 2011 János Varga (Cégep John Abbott College) Cloud-based Blended Synchronous/Asynchronous Shared Documents János Varga explains how cloud-based blended synchronous/asynchronous shared documents promote collaboration and active learning among students.
Monday August 24 2009 Sophie Ringuet (Cégep@distance) Using On-line Academic Forums As students now collaborate on the web for academic purposes as well as for fun, the electronic forum has become an excellent tool to encourage academic motivation. Sophie Ringuet, a pedagogical counselor at Cégep@distance gives us an in-depth tour of what a forum is as well as various academic applications where the forum can be of interest. The report presents concrete examples and and a detailed guide to their use within an academic context. The reference section allows the reader to go beyond the information presented by indicating resources in both English and in French. We hope that you will find Profweb's article 'Using On-line Academic Forums' a useful resource to familiarize yourself with forums. Feel free to comment and ask questions in the sections provided for this purpose.
Monday January 19 2009 Charles-Antoine Bachand (Cégep de l'Outaouais) Teaching and Learning Using Blogs Charles-Antoine Bachand of Cégep de l'Outaouais explains why and how blogs can be interesting pedagogical tools.

Reports List (10)

Reports

Monday December 4 2006

Tools to Communicate and Collaborate With on the Web: an Overview

Alain Farmer Researcher

The Issue
Practical Applications
Useful References
What's new?

Download this report as a PDF

The Issue

Most written works on the subject of the World Wide Web (WWW) begin by demonstrating its ubiquity. But nowadays, no one can seriously contest the fact that the Web and the Internet are increasingly used, even daily. If you're not convinced yet, then take a moment to examine some recent statistics concerning Web use among Quebecers :

63.5 % of Quebec adults have used the Internet ( a steady progression since the year 2000 );
Canadian users aged 12-and-up are ranked 9th (68 %) in the world;
Canadian adults are ranked 15th (63 %);
On average, Quebec web users browse the web 4.9 hours per week;
The majority of Quebecers (58.1 %) mainly visit francophone web sites;
42.3 % of the Quebec population has used Internet on the job;
25 % has used Internet to work from home;
56.2 % of adults have communicated using e-mail ( their favorite activity );
29 % of Quebecers have sought employment via the Internet;
28.5 % of Quebecers are subscribed to at least one mailing list;
12.3 % of Quebec adults have consulted at least one blog;
10.5 % have attended one or more online courses.

Here is a fact that may surprise you, however. Did you know that e-mail was available even before the WWW came into being? Or, that e-mail was, and still is, an indispensable tool for the development of the WWW? From the pre-dawn of the Web, to this day, each user is identified by his or her e-mail address. As soon as someone is hired by a college, he or she is attributed an e-mail address. When filling administrative forms, it is often necessary to include it as your identifier. In some colleges, payroll deduction information is e-mailed. Given the frequency of use of e-mail addresses, they have therefore been simplified, in order to make them easier to remember (mnemonic), easier to infer (normalized), and less subject to change.

But, beyond e-mail, many impressive tools of communication and collaboration have emerged (sprung forth) from the development of the Internet. Innovations that never cease to amaze us, or at least surprise us, or, at the very least, raise interesting issues that compel us to question ourselves. Confronted with e-mail, mailing-lists, wikis, blogs, forums and RSS feeds, the teacher asks herself or himself :

Which collaboration tools should I chose?
Will they genuinely improve my teaching?
Will they enrich the learning experience of my students?
Will using these tools increase my workload?
Will I be able to use these tools adequately?
How will I remain up-to-date as time goes by?

On the other hand, using these communication/collaboration tools will allow teachers to :

notify students when class is postponed or cancelled;
share a document discussed in class;
follow-up on a theme begun in class;
receive students' work via a secure Internet connection;
inform students of the grade they obtained in a scored activity;
avoid wasting precious class-time on administrative details;
orient one or more students at the very moment that they need it;
interact with students who are too shy to fully express themselves in class;
communicate with students who are apprenticing from a distance;
lead, oversee and evaluate teamwork, in and beyond the classroom.

The above list is not exhaustive, but the examples provided are sufficient for you to see one or more ways how you can integrate computer-mediated communication and collaboration tools into your teaching practice. Certain Web tools focus on student co-construction of knowledge instead of a more teacher-led pedagogical strategy where the rôle of the students is quite passive, often limited to listening and taking notes. These tools empower students to work in teams, to collaboratively negotiate a shared frame-of-reference, to perform case-studies, to solve complex problems together, to accomplish multi-disciplinary projects, and so on. Isn't this, after all, the goal we are aiming for when we put approaches based on self-directed competence and capability-building into practice?

This article is a broad overview of the web tools that are currently available. It covers e-mail, mailing lists, chats, forums, blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. It also suggests several ways to integrate them in your pedagogical practice, without going into the nitty-gritty details that you don't need to know for now or perhaps ever. When you have in mind a concrete application and you are ready to pursue it, we invite you to contact the IT-respondant of your college. He or she will help you, and guide you towards the appropriate resources. For our part, we hope that this overview of currently available web tools will clarify your choices, support you during your first awkward steps, unleash your IT ideas and project plans, while lessening your legitimate apprehensions regarding the integration of these new technologies in your teaching practice.

Concretely, this article is divided into three (3) sections. The first section broadly describes the issues related to the pedagogical integration of information technologies, as well as the currently available tools. The next section, In Practice, expands upon the pedagogical potential and pitfalls of each type of tool using the following sub-sections: Synonyms, Description, Uses, Advantages, Disadvantages, and Suggestions. The third section, Useful References , concludes this overview, by guiding you towards samples and resources that will allow you to further explore the IT tools that have caught your eye.

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