brainstorming – Education, Technology & Business

In my last post I discussed my reasons for moving at least part of my case-based class to some in-class group brainstorming and/or collaborative work. The Web sites and tools that I am considering at first pass are the following:

Use case (or “how I think I want to use these tools”)

Here is how I envision using this tool in my introduction to business class. We generally begin a case discussion by answering some basic questions about the company and situation, and then try to identify the roots of the basic problem. Though these are straight-forward and expected questions, they tend to set an important foundation of common understanding for the rest of the discussion. A couple of problems tend to raise themselves here:

If the first student or two don’t get it, then the class can go off in the wrong direction for quite a while.
Only one or two students get involved in the initial discussion and get some buy-in on the case during this initial phase because this is generally a discussion with just a small number of students.

I want to have the students break into groups of 4-6 students and fill out a basic outline of information related to the case. Maybe I provide the outline or maybe they build it themselves. After 5 minutes of collaborative editing on the documents, each group would then also talk for another 5 minutes about what they have created, where they agree, and where they disagree. They would then post the document to the class Web site for all to see (so that I can learn their thinking about these cases). Then we could start the discussion. I assume that this would start from a better place and would allow us to have a more well-informed and directed discussion.

Desired features

Given the above I am looking for the following general features in this tool:

Multiple people editing the document
Ability to export the document to some archive format (PDF, RTF, or Word)
Ability to quickly re-organize a document
Show relationships among ideas
Ability to show high level view of relationships
Site licensing would be good, but free would be better
Ability to easily integrate with other tools and work habits
Works on multiple software platforms (Web, iOS, Android)
Works on multiple hardware platforms (laptop, cell phone, tablet)

Quick view

This table provides a quick overview of my impressions of each of these tools. Below I provide a more detailed discussion.

Tool	Multi edit	Export	Reorg	Relat	Hi level	Cost	Integr	SW plat	HW plat
Mindmeister	many	many	5	5	5	Edu discount, expensive	5	Web, iOS, Android	5
Edistorm	Unlimited	Excel, PDF	4	4	4	Edu discount, $49/yr	4	Web, iOS	4
Google Docs	Up to 50	Many	4	4	5	Free	5	5	4

More detailed discussion

Generally, each one of these tools could meet my needs. The choice of any one of them requires compromise. Overall, I found Mindmeister to be the clear features winner, but it is also clearly the most expensive tool by far. Google Docs is a tool that many people (and most of my students since we are now a Google Apps for Education campus) will be comfortable working in. Edistorm is a tool that I wanted to like more because I am definitely a “sticky-notes-on-the-wall” type of guy; in any case, it definitely still could work for many situations.

Mindmeister

This is a great application. It has so many features that it would take a while to get comfortable with them all but it still is basically straight-forward enough that a person could get comfortable with it during one session. I found its interface to be sleek, slick, and flexible. After creating a document, a user can then export it to just about any application that he might want to. It can also be directly integrated into the Google Apps platform, if desired.

As for the cost, currently the campus educational discount certainly helps. Let’s say that I have 60 students in my class, and my class lasts for 4 months. The cost for this period would be $240 — not an unreasonable amount, but certainly not inexpensive.

Edistorm

As I stated above, I am a sticky-notes kind of guy. I like working with a team standing around a space on the wall, each of us with our sticky notes, writing, pointing, placing and re-placing notes. It just works for me.

Edistorm works much the same way as this group sticky-note process (after your sign up for a free account, be sure to watch their brief introduction video; I wish I could give you a direct link, but they don’t provide one), but it has one drawback — it has a small screen to work with. If each student has a desktop with a 24″ monitor, I could see this tool working quite well; however, with the sticky notes themselves taking up a fairly significant footprint on the screen, it fairly quickly starts spilling over the edges of the screen so that you are then only able to see a subset of the sticky notes. The company is definitely aware of this as they provide lots of tools for working around this limitation. They have done a good job, but I think they need to take the next step and allow the sticky notes to automatically adjust their own size to fit the text. Maybe that would help.

Pricing here is much more reasonable. Only the administrator/teacher needs to pay in order for the students to work on a “storm” during a class. In order to get a reasonable amount of features, this means that the cost is $49/year, and this gets a teacher 2 currently active storms. It is quite reasonable that a teacher could have two different sections or classes using Edistorm without having to increase the cost. Quite reasonable.

Google Docs

Google Docs isn’t exactly a concept mapping tool (but it plays one in the movies…sorry) but its familiarity to students might allow them to become productive more quickly and with less “hassle.” GDocs is clearly a text-based tool that displays concepts hierarchically. It is clearly easy to move text from within a GDoc to another document, and these documents are viewable on just about any platform; however, as anyone who has tried to edit a GDoc on an iOS device knows, Google has not exactly done their best to integrate other hardware platforms into the application environment. I definitely would insist that students use a Web browser on a laptop or desktop instead of a tablet or phone — the functionality just isn’t there yet on these smaller devices.

Conclusion

I still have time before I need to make a final decision. I would like to use Mindmeister, but I need to make sure that I have the money for it. If not, then I would use Edistorm if they address the problem related to the size of the sticky notes. Finally, if neither of these options are available, then I will fall back on Google Docs; the functionality is there and students know how to use the application.

Now that I am relatively confident that these applications have the features that I need for this type of work, I need to think about what other uses they might have. But that will have to wait for now…

What do you think about these tools? Do you have any experience using them in the way that I describe? Did I miss anything? I would love to hear from you!

In contrast to my writing so far on this blog, I teach one introduction to business class in which I don’s use any technology. I mean not any, unless you count a white board and pens as technology. It is a traditional Harvard-style case discussion class — three years ago I was tutored by two Harvard-trained professors in the method. I had never taught that way before, so it was quite a shock to me. No slides, no lecture, no pre-defined exercises…just discussion and the Socratic method. Yes, the teaching notes that I had written (along with my “board plan”) provided guide posts both for where I hoped the discussion would go and for the learning points that I wanted to discuss. But it is definitely a free-wheeling type of experience, one in which I really had to trust that my students would get us to the right place by the end of the class. I love the experience.

This last year I taught the class alone for the first time. I continued to teach case-based, but I made two slight changes. Both changes were in response to my observation about class participation. I have had between 52-68 students in any one section of this course. In any 3 hour session, each student can easily have 2 opportunities to make a significant contribution to the class. That’s in theory. In actuality, maybe 10% of the students barely ever say anything, no matter how much I coax them. Participation used to count 35% of the final grade, so a score of 25-50% on that portion would seriously hurt their final grade in the course. I don’t like this because I know these students have something to contribute, have something to teach the rest of us.

In response, this last year I cut participation down to 20% of their grade and added a blogging component (worth 20%) to their grade. This provided students with a different way of teaching and sharing with the rest of the class. While some students continued to have difficulty contributing during class, basically everyone seemed to do a good job with the blogs (which somewhat mitigated some low participation scores).

Those changes still doesn’t seem to be enough. I am still going to teach cases. I still think that students grow from the give-and-take that this method provides. I think the ability to speak clearly, to use evidence, and to defend one’s position extemporaneously are invaluable skills. Some students begin the term with so little confidence speaking to a room full of people (even though the group consists of their peers) that their voices shake with fear and nerves; many of these same students end the year with a vastly increased sense of value and confidence. I don’t want to take that away.

What I am thinking of doing is adding some group-based activities and discussions to the class. This might help those who need to try out their ideas in a smaller group. It also might allow more people to gain a better connection to the material since they wouldn’t have to wait for me to call on them — they could have their discussions and make their points within the small groups. I have always worried when there is group work and one transcriber who is responsible for putting the notes (that are supposed to reflect the group’s work) into the document. All too often, it ends up being that one person’s ideas. With some new software that is out there, I’m thinking of having small groups of students work together around a co-edited document, talking among themselves, working through ideas that appear, and preparing themselves to defend their proposal to the rest of class.

The Web sites and tools that I’m thinking about are the following:

Each feels slightly different and provides a different experience for the student. Have any of you had any experience with these in-class activities? If so, let me know in the comments.

Tomorrow I plan on writing about my explorations related to these three tools.

Tag: brainstorming

Tools for in-class group brainstorming and collaboration