SubCollaboration: Easy to maintain shared folders

A few years back, following the urge to include the use of "advanced" tools in my courses I decided to deploy Subversion, a version control tool commonly used in software development projects. The objective was for students to get used to these tools. For the non-techies, a version control tool is simply a program that stores all the changes you perform in a set of files or folders in your working space. These changes are stored in a remote repository allowing the files to be shared among different users.

These tools are used in software development because typically, source code files need to be shared among the development team, and fairly often, the historical data is accessed to go back and "undo" some changes. This scenario typically required some non-trivial user training to explain the concept of version, remote repository, commit changes, etc.

With these premises we decided to use this tool in one of our courses. The first stumbling block was to scale it to the class of more than 100 students. Also, to ease the adoption, we wanted to create a "reference" folder that was then cloned to each of the groups in the course. This folder contained some initial documents, instructions, etc. These tasks lead to the creation of a tool called "Subcollaboration" that provides a much simpler front-end for an administrator to manage a reference folder and clone it so that the users in a team share the same folder.

After several years of experience, there are some interesting conclusions and some encouraging future venues. The first surprising fact was the almost effortless adoption by the students. Explaining to them that there was a remote repository where files lived and were shared among them produced the typical "Duh!"-face. They already do that with videos, pictures, bookmarks... Where is the big deal? The second interesting observation (although highly biased!) is that instructors also welcomed the tool. I know, instructors of techie courses are techies themselves. True. But the dirty work with the tool is passed to an administrator, and instructors can have a copy of the folders shared by the teams they supervise with almost no effort thanks to tools such as Tortoise SVN (which I strongly recommend to non-techies).

Version control tools require the user to "send" new versions to the repository. Tutors may then check the activity on the folder and see which team members are contributing and what are they sending. Questions arising when working in a document are also easy to handle. Students may post the question in a forum referring to a document in their shared folder. The instructor may then download the latest copy and answer the student. And you will say, Google Docs already does that and much better, yes, but try using Google Docs and this scheme in a course with a total of 200 students.

SubCollaboration

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Is it a bit of a stretch to call this a PLE (Personal learning environment)? May be so. But what we also discovered is that using this tool we gained a lot of insight on how students work in their personal environments. In my opinion, learning is happening less and less in LMSs (Learning Management Systems like Moodle) and more in the user personal space. What a better form to gain insight on that work than by offering a shared folder? With this approach, we feel that we are closer to the student during the personal learning stage.

As for future venues, evolve this folder and use it as a vehicle to slide a more formal collaborative scenario. A peer-review paradigm could be easily deployed by providing some special folders and manage the permissions to read/write documents in them. A pyramid discussion, when reflected in documents, could also be implemented using the discussed functionality as the basis. May be scripting a collaborative learning scenario within the restrictive limits imposed by a LMS is more complicated than simply describe the activity and scaffold it with some basic folders

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So many interesting things to try, so little time...

PS:We wrote a more formal scientific article to be published in a journal. I you want a copy of it, feel free to ask.