1. Lessons for the future

a) There was confusion regarding the instructions: were students to cover simply an assigned selection of text, and/or the general questions?

(Ess had been curious to see how students would take to this new environment without a lot of coaching - in particular, would they be able to organize their groups and specific tasks effectively? You did quite well for a first-time experience with a novel technology - but clearly, more specific directions would have been helpful.)

b) There were relatively few comments that raised and responded to specific questions, in the manner of a "chat" or on-line conversation. Students weren't specifically told to use the software this way - but there seems to be consensus, now that we know, that this is a good use of the technology.

Comments:

• "Good to see others' ideas."
  
  "I think it is great that you can clarify questions for each other!"
  
  

c) This assignment was essentially a collaborative/group assignment: each individual was responsible to the larger group for certain tasks. At least one student expressed some frustration, if not anger, with those students who did not live up to their responsibilities toward the larger group.

d) At the same time, there were any number of glitches that prevented students from accessing the system:

• the server went down for several hours on the first evening of the assignment;
  
  at least one student who lives off-campus cannot easily dial into the campus network and thus access the system;
  
  at least two students could not access the system because of lack of familiarity with Motet and/or Motet's use of passwords in particular - though everyone else found it easy and straightforward.
  

This "variability of access" problem is a serious problem.

2. Student comments on one another's postings.

In general, student comments matched precisely the ones I would make in evaluating this writing in a formal paper:

• "excellent relation between two texts"
  
  "makes it very clear"
  
  "good use of quotes"
  
  "only the first crisis was discussed in the writings."
  
  "There is an excellent comparison by one of the authors, but other areas are lacking."
  
  "freedom had been brought up, but most of the discussion was lacking. Interpretation was needed of the text by the authors."
  
  

especially with regard to use of quotes:

• "quotes were mostly used in context, but several were not discussed and seemed to be present only to take up space. Several quotes were also too long to understand. The reader gets lost rather easily."
  
  "how does this relate?"
  
  "explain more"
  
  "good explanation of the information" (re. an entry with extensive use of quotes);
  
  "I don't really understand what this is trying to explain" (re. an entry with no use of quotes);
  
  "There were too many quotes: I got lost making jumps from quotes to discussion" (re. an entry which included many good quotes, but was light on explanation of the quotes);
  
  "quotes are not discussed or elaborated on - discussion seems completely out of context"
  
  "are there any quotes to back this 'solving' of crises up?"
  
  "Great quote! It explains Atman and Brahman more effectively by using text!"