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The design of the CSCLN ATOM

[Notes for teachers and authors]

Aims

1. Each student will learn the material from the lecture they are assigned to better. Writing notes in any new format requires mental re-processing, just as writing an essay does, and both understanding and learning usually result.
   
2. Students need notes to revise from. This will give them an alternative form of such notes: with higher quality because they were done at the time, and contributed to by many.
   
3. The Q&A format is probably a good one we should use more. Lectures are normally delivered as material, without saying what they are useful for. The challenge (to the teacher) implicit in this format is: what use is this material? Each question is an answer to this challenge; poor questions imply a poorly motivated lecture.
   
4. Peer collaboration is well known in the research literature to have educational benefits, but little is done to promote it. This promotes it.
   
5. Team work is required in most jobs: this gives students a little practice at a typical task: producing a document for others.
   
6. Team work mediated by electronic media (CSCW) is interesting, may be increasingly required in jobs, is a topic closely related to HCI but not in the syllabus of this course. This exercise will give students a little experience of it, and of its difficulties.
   
7. The questions and discussion will be valuable feedback signals to the teacher on what students made of each lecture, and what didn't go across successfully. So feedback to teacher will be a major benefit of the exercise, and in a context that allows some immediate remedial action (giving better answers than the class could generate, and having them recorded where they will be a permanent resource for the whole class).

Objectives

How it fits into the course

Rationale (why is the exercise designed this way?)

• Learner reprocessing. Re-expressing material in a new format (e.g. essay assignments) is a powerful aid to learning. This is one way of organising this. On this theory, each student will learn best the material they write the notes on.
• Self-monitoring. By looking at each others' notes, they gain an extra bit of information about how well they understood each lecture (each piece of material). This is an alternative source of information often tacitly gained in tutorials and in question time at lectures: finding out what other students do and don't know. Higher education depends on students managing their own learning, which depends upon their self-estimates of how well they know material.
• Feedback to teachers Similarly, the teacher is likely to discover in good time problems either because the web notes are inaccurate or because the students ask about points when uncertain how to write up the notes.
• Peer interaction Peer interaction is good for learning content, good for giving opportunities for self-monitoring, and good for building a community spirit in the class. However attempts to promote student discussion frequently fail. This is one way of stimulating it.

• CSCW experience In the context of an HCI course, this is also seen as positive as a practical experience of CSCW.
• Practice at web authoring In the context of an information technology course in 1998, it was seen as positive just by being an occasion for practicing web authoring.
• The Q&A format as another perspective on material The question and answer format is itself interesting. It could be interesting to take this further, and construct more course materials as if they were a reference manual (i.e. indexed by questions). To the extent this is pursued, it could offer another angle on a course than the one given in lectures or textbooks. You can look at the list of questions on the lower part of the index page to get an impression of this in this application. For more on this see this memo, particularly this section of it.

Delivery

Planning

And you have to be ready to launch it in the first minutes of the first lecture, including selecting the first team (for that lecture). Of course if you have warned the class in advance, that would be good.

The method of assigning students to teams (groups), which is also explained to the students, is at the end of this link.

Resources/media

TRAILs: past student work

Evaluation reports and comments