On the official course evaluation form at my school, students tick a box that indicates whether the course involved group work. I get to tick off a separate box, in which I indicate whether I think group work is important for the course, but seeing that box there semester after semester naturally makes me think of more ways to do group work.

I noticed Trent Baston has been writing some interesting opinion pieces for Campus Technology. Yesterday's article was "Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?" Here's the teaser:

Academics have long talked of the "academic conversation." Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them?

See also these recent articles:

Thought folks here would be interested in the material in the latest Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Here are the articles that interest me most, but they all look great:

Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances
Hugo Liu
A social network profile's lists of interests can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. Based on a semiotic approach, different types of taste statements are identified and further investigated through a statistical analysis of 127,477 profiles collected from MySpace.

Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com
Dara N. Byrne
Participants on BlackPlanet are deeply committed to ongoing discussions about black community issues. However, none of these discussions moved beyond a discursive level of civic engagement, suggesting that the potential for mobilization through social networking online has not yet been realized.

The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses
Minjeong Kim
Using a mixed-methods approach, this study characterizes Creative Commons (CC) licensors, the ways that they produce creative works, and the private and public interests that CC licenses serve.

This is great. Two stories in Wired: one about current uses of wikis, and another that gives the backstory of the first story. The first story I linked to, "Veni, Vidi, Wiki," was coedited 348 times by Socialtext users. The second consists of the author's reflections on the wiki editing experience. Read both the stories; they offer a great window into what wiki-style collaboration is like.