Activities

Purpose

Activities is work that you will do with other students in the class. Research shows that collaborative writing and the negotiation of meaning among learners facilitates the process of understanding a course's material. Activities, similar to Responses, are designed to give you an opportunity to work through an understanding of the course material, as well as a way to see how others are responding to the course material.

Collaborative Teams

You will work in the following collaborative teams throughout the course of the semester. These teams may be subject to change throughout the course of the semester to make the teams and the course run more effectively and efficiently.

Writing Instructions

You will not be assigned to a collaborative team for Activity work until the evening of the add/drop period–January 22, 2019.

By the second week for Activity #1 determine how you will do the collaborative work. Some suggestions include...

• working synchronously (i.e., at the same time) within a Google Document to complete the assignment. You will want to set up regular times to meet. Note that you can also use Google Hangout if you want to have a synchronous video meeting
• working asynchronously (i.e., at different times) by assigning different roles to collaborators for different tasks (e.g., researcher, organizer, drafter, compiler, proofreader). It is often best to rotate these roles
• working asynchronously (i.e., at different times) by posting separate responses in the same folders your team creates in your shared Collaborative Group folder or separate responses on the same document. Then rotate among the group members who will compile a single response from these separate contributions

In either case, your collaboration group will be responsible for providing evidence of the collaboration process. This proof of collaboration can be seen through a few different means:

• If each collaborator wrote something on a Google Document–either during synchronous or asynchronous collaboration, it will show up in the history function which the instructor can check
• If the collaborators worked synchronously or asynchronously in a Google Document, each collaborator can use the comment function (Insert > Comment; remember to click the blue "Comment" button after you write something). Do not resolve any of the comments; leave them there for the instructor to read
• If the collaborators work asynchronously in their team folders, each team member has to have made a contribution to this folder
• If all team members' name are signed to a document, the instructor will assume that the team agrees that each member contributed equally unless otherwise stated. If a student who did not contribute to a document signed her/his name after the fact, make sure the rest of the group informs the instructor.
• Submit a single document that has both the individual contributions from each team member (maybe color coded) and the final submission.

If you are using Google Document, you can use the chat function if you are working synchronously to discuss with your group what you are going to say before you start actually writing it in the document. Unfortunately you cannot copy and paste the transcript of the chat to demonstrate collaboration.

Unfortunately collaborative work does not always achieve its potential. If a group is having problems with a member who is not collaborating equally and there is clear evidence of this, the grades on the activity will reflect the disproportionate contribution. If this unequal collaboration continues to be a problem, then the other group members can fire this person from the group. To fire someone from the group, the collaborators with the grievance need to 1) document the problem and 2) approach the instructor about the problem. The instructor will intervene at this time. If there is documented evidence that the problem with the collaborator persists, then the instructor will remove the collaborator not doing work from the group. A collaborator removed from a group will have to do the group work alone and will lose 30 points from the Activities grade (or 20%).

Instructions-Writing

On certain Tuesdays or Friday by 11:30pm, you are responsible for submitting a collaborative Activities document. You will want to...

• do the assigned 'readings' for that day
• read the link for that day's Activity and collaboratively respond to the prompt; each response is usually 500-750 words

As with the Responses, the more you engage with the reading and writing of these materials at this stage of the process, the more feedback you get from the instructor which will make writing your assignments easier. Therefore, it is not recommended that you simply go through the motions in writing up these responses. Also, like the Responses, the collaborators can use their responses to the Activities to discuss things they do not understand from the readings.

You will be evaluated on your engagement with the material. Specifically the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

• your understanding of the assigned reading, video, or podcast, or an attempt to understand it by posing specific questions
• your ability, in many cases, to apply what you have read or watched
• an ability to connect the response to previous work in the course
• attempts to move beyond obvious explanations and conclusions when analyzing other's texts–in other words, an open-mindedness to new ideas
• your ability to work together to create a single document with a single voice that reflects diverse ideas from the team. Therefore, the document you submit should not refer to "I" or "me."

You can compose Activities one of two ways:

1. Compose the Activities in a Google Document and submit it to the Google Classroom
2. Compose the Response with another word processing application, like Microsoft Word, and upload it to the Google Classroom

Only one person from each team needs to submit the Activity to the Google Classroom; however, all other team members should mark the Activity as done in Google Classroom

Responses should be submitted on time.

Each Activity is worth 25 points with all Activities being worth 150 points.