A couple of posts ago I briefly touched on the idea of developing a pattern language of educational conversations and building tools that support particular patterns. Web Collaborator is a good example of what this might look like. Basically, it’s a single discussion thread tied to a single wiki page. The wiki is for collaborative writing of a document and the discussion thread is for editing process conversations about the document. The wiki also logs document changes and has a roll-back feature. As a bonus, it provides a log of who contributed what, so instructors have at least some measure of each member’s contribution to the group product. The educational conversation pattern that it affords might be called something like “Small Group Collaborative Writing.”
(Found via Weblogg-ed.)
