An example of real-world student work: The women's legal history website.

The Women's Legal History Website at Stanford Law School has a nice set of biographical chapters on women lawyers written by students, for example "Florence Ellinwood Allen, a woman of firsts". It is a great illustration of how students can make a real contribution. These could so easily have gone the way of most student essays - written purely to please a professor and of no use to anyone (except maybe enterprising students from the following year's course who cut and paste large sections on the usually correct assumption that the over-worked professor won't notice). I think professor Barbara Babcock, who is behind the initiative, did a number of things right here:

• Requiring of students to contribute not only to what happens in the classroom, but also to the larger community of practice.
• Pitching the task at the right level, so that most students were able to produce work that is good enough to be useful to a larger audience.
• Structuring the task in such a way that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Separately the essays would be just more documents on the web, together they form a uniquely useful resource.
• Structuring the task in such a way that it is on on-going project - not just for this year's students, but something next year's students can build on.

There may nevertheless be ways in which both the quality of the learning experience and the value of the resource can be further enhanced, for example:

• Provide more contextual information about how each chapter was created. Not just the name of the author, but a bit more about who s/he is, when s/he wrote the chapter, what else s/he has done. Information about what the professor and other students thought about the chapter, where they think there may still be gaps, how it might be improved.
• Provision for on-going interaction around each chapter and around the resource as a whole, not only by students but also by others in the larger community of practice. People notice small errors; they may have some additional information; they may want to dispute some or other interpretation. Make it easy for them to contribute comments and annotations and the resource will grow in quality while students learn more about interaction with the network of people interested in their field.

By Martin Terre Blanche 8 Oct 2004 [Collaborative Learning]
6:14:24 AM