Cloud Work

February 28th

Today in class, students were able to collaboratively create notes on a Google document while the professor used a white discussion board for lecture.  As the professor was lecturing, students were adding text, gifs, images, and memes to the "notes."  Sometimes, a student would delete an image one student pasted onto the document and then insert a new image.  Sometimes, text would be deleted and then reinserted.  While the students had the power to contribute content freely onto this document, the professor was the only one at the front of the classroom, taking notes on the white board.  As students, we were given access to this online document and had the ability/privilege to edit it as a whole. 

Cloud work enables us as a group to contribute our ideas visually to an audience.  Meanwhile, having a professor write on a white board is much more limiting.  The professor is the only one who is given the right to use this resource, unless students are told otherwise.  As a result, we tend to get one primary ideology of a particular topic whereas cloud work shows multiple perspectives. 

Although many students participated in editing the document, I decided not to.  My decision to not participate was for mainly two reasons: 1) I felt more pressure to listen to the professor's lecture and therefore, tried to direct my attention to the whiteboard and 2) any content I added could be easily deleted by another student.  Due to usual social structure of classroom behavior, I was persuaded to attempt to concentrate on the lecture given by the professor.