collabration support
Collaboration
We are currently collaborating on the Campus Sustainability Topic. Click here to view instructions.
If you are ready to commence collaborating on Population, click here to view instructions.
Previous Collaboration Topics
Tragedy of the Commons - completed
Purpose of the collaboration
The purpose of the collaboration with students from the National University of Singapore is to give you the opportunity to discuss contemporary sustainability topics with students from a different country, and in doing so expose you to a variety of different perspectives that are different from your own. As such, each collaboration week you will be tasked with contacting your fellow collaborators at the National University of Singapore in order to build upon and broaden your understanding of each topic at a regional, and global level.
The collaboration exercises consist a series of goals - usually to contact your collaboration partners and discuss a stimulous question, and then formate a response to that question which captures your collective ideas. You do not need to all agree on the answer, rather your response will do well to capture the various ideas, disagreements, and possible solutions that you discuss throughout your collaboration discussions. The exercises are purposely designed to elicit a diversity of ideas so if you can capture this in your group response to the collaboration questions you will have satisfied the expectations of the collaboration.
What we are looking for in your collaboration responses
- Diversity of ideas
- Points of disagreement/contention
- A realisation that there is no one right answer
- An deeper appreciation that one soltion that works in one place won't necessarily work elsewhere in the world.
Workload expectations
It is not expected that students will devote hours upon hours to the collaboration. A discussion over a period of a few days via a discussion board medium, or email if nothing else works, so as to generate an exchange of ideas between students from Australia and Singapore on the collaboration topic is sufficient. Then capture your ideas and responses to the collaboration questions and include this in your learning portfolio.
The information below will guide you through the collaboration instructions, and give you some brief pointers on making the collaboration work. If you encounter further issues, email Luke.Powter@anu.edu.au who can help you, and if appropriate add further points of guidance to this page for students.
General Information
About the Collaboration
There are 3 tutorial weeks where you will be expected to collaborate with students from the National University of Singapore. These weeks are clearly marked and during those weeks an extra webpage (like this one) will accompany your normal tutorial information page. Sometimes you will be expected to discuss the collaboration topic with your collaboration partners after the tutorial, whilst other weeks you will need to have completed your collaboration before the tutorial. This information will be made clear by your tutors.
Given that this will be your first time collaborating with students from the NUS, some extra information has been provided to you to help explain what you need to do, how you can use this page, and try to make the collaboration experience as valuable as we know it can be without overwhelming you.
How to Collaborate
Each week you will be expected to get in
contact with your fellow collaborators from the NUS (details have been provided to you in the tutorial) to discuss the
tutorial topic so as to gain a deeper understanding of the material by exchanging your views and ideas with NUS students and allow them to do the same with you. It is vital that you put some effort into the exercise as you will be required to hand in work that you develop out of the collaboration into your learning portfolio.
To help you to in this task, the following page has been split into 3 sections with a brief overview of each explained below:
- Collaboration Timing
- Collaboration Requirements
- More Help
Collaboration Timing
As stated earlier, you will mostly be required to collaborate with students from the NUS after the tutorial has taken place, however you will be required to collaborate prior to the final topic on population. To help you remember when to undertake your discussions with the students from Singapore, a box will give you a suggested timeframe to commence discussions, as well as a goal date to finalise your group's response to the collaboration topic (which you will put into your learning portfolio).
Collaboration Requirements
This section will explain what you will need to do. There will usually be a task to undertake with the students from NUS, and then a question or series of questions to address as a group for inclusion in your learning portfolio.
More Help
To help you focus your collaboration discussions, the help section will provide a little more detail on what you are to focus your discussions on by detailing some supplementary ideas or issues that should be explored in addressing the collaboration question. You do not have to answer these questions explicity, rather they will help guide your discussions and thinking, and will help inform your ideas to get as much from the collaboration as you can.
Top
Making the collaboration work
There are numerous ways to make your collaboration work. We have given you the contact details of students from the NUS and the students from NUS have your contact details. Email is a handy way to get the ball rolling, however you might want to look to other platforms for your collaboration once you have all been in communication with each other.
There are a wide variety of options to facilitate your discussions:
Chat rooms or Voice Over Internet Protocol
Chat rooms or Conference Calls are a good way to communicate with all your members of the are available at the same time. Chat rooms facilitate discussions in real time and do a good job of allowing you to bounce ideas off each other. Voice Over Internet Protocol is like using a phone except over the internet and free. Such mediums do have some significant shortcomings as all collaborators need to be available at the same time to chat, if this can't be done you should consider a different medium to conduct your collaborations.
Examples:
Forums, Blogs, Wikis, and websites
Such websites are a helpful way to conduct discussions since people can come and go as they please, read what others have written and make their own contributions. Collaboration members do not need to be online at the same time, and most forums or blogs are pretty straight forward to use and understand. It is not as effective as instant messaging or conference calling, however it is the next best thing if people are too busy to meet up at the same time. Such mediums are do have significant weaknesses as they can be open to abuse if the forum or blog is freely available to the general internet community so you may want to consider making your blog or forum private if the option is available.
Examples:
Document Sharing
Google docs allows you to upload word document files and you can then easily edit uploaded files, you can then invite collaborators to access your file and they can then make changes to the document. Only those who you invite have access to the document, and the changes made to the document are managed in a way that is easily to follow changes made by other collaborators should they access the same document at the same time. This system is a great way to generate a collaboration response however it may be difficult to generate effective discussions when compared to instant messaging or forums/blogs.
Example:
Alliance
Alliance is a collaborative tool that is available to all students of the ANU. It is a combination of the above tools - it has inbuilt instant chat rooms, discussion forums, and document sharing. It is for these reasons that students have been made aware of the system, however it can be a little confusing to set up and for this reason, students should be weary that they may get frustrated or confused when they try to set up a collaboration project site. All students enrolled in the course have been enrolled in a blank SRES1001 project site so that they can see what Alliance can be used for - it is advisable that students make their own site rather than use the SRES1001 site so that it is private and not open to vandalism by other students.
Email can be annoying because having to "reply to all" to 6 or more people can be time consuming and ineffective. Having said this, if you appoint a leader to manage the ANU replies to emails to Singapore, it would be possible to coordinate a combined response to emails from students from Singapore without the chaos of undirected email replies which are not focused, nor directed to a common purpose.
help! things aren't working
If things don't go to plan - you might need to work out strategies to compromise, or work out what is at issue and address any problems.
No Contact
If you are not able to contact your fellow collaborators, the best course of action is to contact your tutor or Luke who will ensure you have the correct contact details and coordinate with the teaching staff in Singapore to find out what the issue is.
Can't Make a Decision
If your group struggles to decide upon the best platform to use as part of the collaboration, try eliminating options which cannot work and work your way to deciding upon something which everyone can use, and is comfortable accessing. If there is disagreement on what to use, you may want to take the initiative and make a website, wiki, or contact people through an Instant Messenger to show them that whatever options they were considering can be useful for the task. If all else fails, get in contact with a member of teaching staff.
Compromise
Not getting your way can be frustrating, but choose your battles as there is nothing to gain from a disagreement over trivial matters.
Work through your problems
If something is important enough to warrant disagreement, don't ignore it. Hear what the different viewpoints are and find out a way to sort of out the agreement so that both sides can be satisfied. Compromise is one way to settle disputes but there is nothing wrong for aiming for a win-win situation either!
Don't get sidetracked with conflict
As I have alluded to above, it is important to take conflict seriously as disagreement is a good way to hear different viewpoints, however don't let this distract you from your goal which is to collaborate on the tutorial topics and reach an outcome for your learning portfolios.
Following a discussion if disagreement persists you might need to agree to disagree, or if the disagreement is not too significant flip a coin, or work out a strategy to quickly wrap up the dispute so that you can move on with your collaboration.
Neutral mediator
If your group is feeling quite passionate about the dispute, why not ask a student from another group who is willing to donate some of their time to act as a neutral mediator who can chair a debate style process which allows them to mediate your discussion of the disagreement so that they can help you express your ideas and if need be act as a judge to help you come to a resolution.
It may not be fair to lose the fight, but so long as everyone has an opportunity to have a say on the matter the ultimate outcome may not be as significant as having the opportunity to be heard.
If all else fails
See a member of teaching staff :)
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