History: aw1l 3.1 Results

+ In first cycle students (for example, Functional Ecology-ECOFUN, Health and Environment-SIMA), we have detected that:

+ * They have difficulties to organize themselves in work groups. <br />* They have difficulties to synthesize the information, since it is easier for them including information from digital sources than adapting it to their context and synthesizing the sometimes too long texts.<br />* First cycle students learn quicker and accept better the new methodology than those of the second cycle, even if this varies among degrees.

+ On the contrary, in second cycle students (for example, “Evaluation of Environmental Impact”-AIA, “Applied Ecology-UB”-EAUB, “Applied Vegetable Physiology”-FVA), we have detected that:
+ * In general, they can organize themselves much better than first cycle students and they have previous experience in working in teams (distributing work, assuming roles inside the team and taking profit more efficiently of the effort and time invested).
+ * Many of the teams have not been of new formation but the members already knew each other and had collaborated or are collaborating in other assignments or subjects of the degree
+ * They are people with resources that tend to know already how to 'move' themselves at university and use the available resources quite efficiently
+ * Depending on the details of size and type of assignment for work groups, the Wiki methodology has been little or very accepted:
+ ** In some cases, the grade of acceptance of the Wiki methodology has been very low (subject FVA) partly attributable to the fact that they are in their last year of the degree (their priority is to finish, they take many subjects in some cases, and they don't have time to learn novel methodologies, especially if they have other tools that they manage well enough, even if they lack some of the needed features for group work that Wiki technology includes)
+ ** In other cases of subjects in last course, they found positive and negative aspects (subject “Applied Ecology, Environmental Sciences, UAB” - EAUAB). In the positive part resides the facility of distance interaction among them and the fact that, at all times, there is only one “good” copy of the document. It is also positive the fact that the students manage to learn the new technology with little training and information (expressly) given by their lecturer, since their handling of the Web technologies seemed enough for this type of applications. In the negative part resides the fact that they were not too used the Web environment of work, and that the final format for the document was not Web format but paper format.
+ ** Nevertheless, in the case of “Evaluation of Environmental Impact”-AIA, of third course, the students have accepted very well the new Wiki methodology, since for the type of work that they had to do and for the big size of the work groups (15 persons), they were foreseeing that it would facilitate very much the work to them. This way, Wiki has meant a tool and methodology very well valued by students for the comments in class at the end of the course (from both those who could use it, and also from those who had to use the traditional methodology).

+ Lecturers have the impression that if students could have work at an standard Office software environment (either Microsoft or ))OpenOffice((, for example) which could work agile and quick enough for the group work, the success had been much more important. However, the speed of using standard office documents combined with Web folders (Webdav protocol) was not good enough for students nor lecturers, after a pilot experience that was deployed at the early stages of ))UniWiki(( project, besides many other handicaps for the web office methodology use in educational scenarios with the current development of technologies (De Pedro 2005a).

+ On the student side, there where a total of 229 surveys and 223 self-recording tables collected of invested time (divided in methodologies and subjects in Table 3).

+ {SHEET(id=16)}Table 3. Surveys and self-recording tables handed in, for each work methodology and subject.{SHEET}

+ # ''"I have not had any problem to communicate with the members of the group since that we are together in the class and taking profit of the same spare hours is very helpful"''

+ (2)a Wiki-like computer technology ("__Wiki technology__", according to definition and initial prototype of Wiki from Ward Cunningham, 1995).