This semester another instructor and I are going to attempt "across-section" collaboration on projects. For a large project pairs or threesomes of students from his writing section will collaborate with pairs from my section of a technical writing course. The goal is to have students experience online collaboration similar to an all-online course, but with with an extensive safety net.

Anyone else work with a colleague to create virtual teams? What worked and what didn't?

I have turned in the draft of my dissertation, which was a study of writing courses and online "learning management systems" such as Moodle and Blackboard. In particular, I was examining students with special needs and if the LMS platforms used within our department adequately accommodated the students.

We have "template" courses, designed by senior faculty. The primary platform is WebVista (Blackboard). There is no template for Moodle, but it is approved by the department for use in comp and technical writing courses.

Today a student e-mailed me that she was confused by the university's new student portal, so she used Google to search for my senior-level writing course. Instead of locating the advanced technical writing course site, she stumbled into my personal pages and my business pages.

This is not much of a problem, since my personal pages deal with my freelance writing. Having a student read my CV isn't exactly an issue. It's not exciting reading.

For the first time ever, I decided to allow my students to work on a Wikibook project. Normally, my tech comm seniors (Univ. of Minnesota) have to do a community service project. In the past, they have prepared manuals and materials for "Dress for Success," "Helping Hands," and "The Immigration Project" among other non-profits. Service learning as part of tech comm reflects a general philosophy within the UofM that students should do 20 hours of community participation.