“MYSTERY PRESENTER” AKA MARK GUZDIAL GEORGIA TECH From Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration to Learned Helplessness

Swiki/CoWeb: It’s a Wiki Designed for Classwork

Example: Use in Architecture Originally, CoOL (Collaborative On-Line Studio)  Grad students posting courthouse designs for courthouse designers to critique  Won Architecture Magazine and American Institute of Architects Awards  Why? A virtual design studio without specialized hardware that people could use

Example: Use in Computer Science: HCI Review

Uses in Engineering and Computer Science Midterm and final exam reviews Group memory Glossaries Case libraries

More disciplines to interdisciplinary Since it’s working in different disciplines, maybe it would support interdisciplinary studies? Idea: Create a Wiki for “Computational Modeling”  We teach differential equations in Calculus  We teach MATLAB in Computer Science  Chemical engineering Jrs and Srs build simulations, representing differential equations in MATLAB. Benefits of interdisciplinary forum  Who best to answer the Seniors questions about MATLAB than the Frosh learning it?  By working with Jrs/Srs, Frosh figure out why they’re studying diff eqs and MATLAB.

From NSF Funding to…Nothing Cross-disciplinary team wins NSF grant to implement this idea: Guzdial from Computing, Morley from Math, Ludovice and Realff from ChemEng. After 1.5 years…our Swiki had nothing in it.  Examples:  One semester, Architecture class (n=171) and ChemEng class (n=24) started at same time with Swiki.  At week 10,:Arch class had 1500 pages with some pages with 30 authors. ChemEng class didn’t have a single page yet.  In CS class with 340 students, only 22 students used the Swiki in a 15 week semester.

Just how bad was it? On a mandatory assignment involving a math class studying results from Engineering students’ simulations, 40% of math students accepted a zero rather than collaborate with engineers. We provided an Equation Editor in the CoWeb for an Engineering and a Math course to facilitate talking about equations. Not a single student even tried the Editor.

New research! NSF program manager agreed to let us shift our focus. Instead of creating an interdisciplinary Swiki for students, we started exploring a new question: Why are some students so resistant to collaboration? Two main reasons.

Reason 1: Strong Sense of Competition Student quotes on “Why didn’t you participate in CoWeb?” “1) didn't want to get railed 2) with the curve it is better when your peers do badly” “since it is a curved class most people don’t want others to do well” (Note: Students claimed that the course grades were “curved” even when there was none!)

Reason 2: Learned helplessness Student quotes: “I haven't posted about questions because I am confident that my answers are wrong.” “I thought I was the only one having problem understanding what was asked in the exam.” “Who am I to post answers?” “The overall environment for [this class] isn't a very help-oriented environment.” Collaboration is a lot harder than you might think. Sometimes.