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In this chapter I report on a design research project of a digital collaborative platform for an embedded problem-based mathematics curriculum—the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP). The goal of the project is to enhance the teaching and teaming of mathematics that occurs in paper-and-pencil classrooms by leveraging the affordances of digital technologies in a digital classroom environment. In this chapter I share lessons learned for developing the digital collaborative platform for students and teachers, focusing on how the project team: (1) reimagined mathematics problems delivered in a digital collaborative platform, (2) supported a model of collaboration in the digital platform, and (3) provided students with just-in-time supports in the digital collaborative platform. To illustrate the lessons learned, I report on the iterative changes made to features of the digital collaborative platform based on analysis of project data and feedback from teachers and students.
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Collaborative Writing on GitHub: A Case Study of a Book Project
Social coding platforms such as GitHub are increasingly becoming a digital workspace for the production of non-software digital artifacts. Since GitHub offers unique features that are different from traditional ways of collaborative writing, it is interesting to investigate how GitHub features are used for writing. In this paper, we present the preliminary findings of a mixed-methods, case study of collaboration practices in a GitHub book project. We found that the use of GitHub depended on task interdependence and audience participation. GitHub's direct push method was used to coordinate both loosely- and tightly-coupled work, with the latter requiring collaborators to follow socially-accepted conventions. The pull-based method was adopted once the project was released to the public. While face-to-face and online meetings were prominent in the early phases, GitHub's issues became instrumental for communication and project management in later phases. Our findings have implications for the design of collaborative writing tools.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1633437
- PAR ID:
- 10106648
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 305 to 308
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3272973.3274083
