This presentation describes the facilitation of collaborative student production of web reports by interclass and intercampus teams. The first collaboration in S/98 paired C.M. Rodrigue's hazards course with E. Rovai's advanced cartography course at CSU Chico, while the second, in S/03, linked four teams from Rodrigue's hazards course at CSU Long Beach with S. Stewart's cartography courses at CSU Chico. One team additionally linked the hazards course with J. Tyner's advanced cartography course at CSULB. Web reports on selected disasters were prepared both semesters, featuring maps designed by the cartography courses and, in the three-class collaboration, a movie incorporating animated cartography to depict the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. This project was presented at the Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Education in F/03 and was written up in the L.A. Times. This presentation will summarize the process of facilitating such active-learning, collaborative projects, ending with problems encountered and lessons learned.

Like many institutions of higher learning, the California State Universities encourage experimentation with non-traditional means of "content delivery," particularly those involving the application of technology. The presumed hope is eventually to lower the cost per student of "delivering" higher education or, alternatively, to enable the "delivery" of a college education to the burgeoning numbers of college-eligible potential students.

To that end, the CSU has provided moneys that are competitively available to faculty, in order to fund released time, software or hardware purchases, and student assistants to enable faculty to try promising applications of technology towards learning. One such program was the CSU Learning Productivity Program grants, for which Eugenie Rovai and I successfully applied in Spring 1997 at California State University, Chico.

Our proposal was to work out a way of enabling two different classes to collaborate on a common project through the Internet. With two student assistants funded through the project and a third graduate teaching intern, we spent Fall 1997 working out the logistics and specific objectives of a web- based project that would appropriately integrate the content of one class and the skills development of another. The courses we had decided to integrate were my senior Natural Hazards course and Eugenie's senior Advanced Cartography course.

Both classes were divided into ten teams. The hazards teams had three students each, while the cartography teams had two students each. Each team was then paired with a team in the partner class.

Each hazard team was assigned one of ten disasters that had struck the State of California over the last century, disasters that Eugenie and I and our assistants had already checked for sufficient published material available through the Chico State library or online. The hazards teams were tasked with researching "their" disasters and writing a team report that had to include specific elements. These elements included a timeline of events related to the disaster, the physical mechanisms that underlay the disaster, the social processes that had made different types of people vulnerable to that kind of disaster, and the emergency response, restoration, and reconstruction activities set off by the event, as well as illustrations and a list of references. They had to find maps at various scales covering the affected area, and they had to identify points, lines, or areas on the maps associated with particular phases of the disaster that could be used as hot links to the rest of the web report.

These materials were then delivered to their cartography course team-mates. The cartography students were tasked with presenting the material on each disaster in an attractively formatted web page, with at least one page for each of the major elements of the hazards' students' reports. The home page for each disaster had to feature an interactive clickable web map, through which visitors would get to the information in the reports. This entailed their construction of a map at an appropriate scale for covering the disaster- struck area, which furthermore had to be constructed at a resolution that would remain legible on the 800 x 600 pixel monitors that were most common at the time.

The usual problems of inspiring groups of students to work together on a common project manifested, magnified somewhat by the interclass collaboration aspects. To keep these in check, the hazards students had to identify their own work within the group reports, rank one another in terms of their contribution to the group projects, with a written critique to explain the degree of difference in the forced rankings. Each student received the group project grade, but the grade was modified in cases where everyone in the group agreed that one person seriously overworked or another slacked or where I thought a student's work was unusually good or poor. The biggest problems were those involving interclass collaboration: hazards students turning in printed maps that were useless as base maps, hazards students turning in inadequate content, or cartography students creating web pages that were not acceptable in appearance to their hazards partners.

Somehow, it all got pulled together and, in late April, the web projects débuted online from a web page I put together to point to the various web reports. The pointer page was left up for a month as a sort of web exhibition, to which the CSU Learning Productivity Program project administrators were invited, as well as the other faculty who had received similar grants. The projects were, furthermore, unveiled in a presentation we made on campus to the Learning Productivity Program conference on campus in May and to the National Social Science Association meeting in late April down in San Diego.

A problem emerged after grades were assigned: One student was extremely, almost violently upset that we wanted to leave the pages up and keep the pointer page active. She said that we were "stealing" her work and violating copyright somehow. After one particularly confrontational discussion, Eugenie, our graduate assistants, and I decided to take a closer look at the page in question, and we quickly found out why the student was so upset. Against our instructions, she had scanned dozens of photographs in the Munz flora, and she was afraid that the publishers would find their images on her web page. We decided to shut down the pointer page and seriously penalize students who scanned copyrighted material rather than link to web images in future spinoffs of this collaboration.

Both Eugenie and I found our style of teaching altered by this collaboration: Eugenie included web mapping in her advanced cartography courses, and I included web reports on disasters in a couple of other hazards courses, both at Chico and now at Cal State Long Beach, where I transferred in Fall 1999. In our original plans, we had hoped to do an intercampus collaboration via the Internet, involving the two of us at Chico and Ben Wisner, who was then at Long Beach. I moved to Long Beach and Ben moved to Oberlin College, so that idea was shelved for several years.

In Fall 2002, Eugenie and I discussed trying something like this again. Eugenie and I are both chairs of our respective departments now, which means a reduced teaching load. I would teach hazards in Spring 2003, but advanced cartography was no longer part of Eugenie's reduced teaching load. So, we approached Steve Stewart, who was by then teaching cartography at Chico, and he gamely agreed to give it a try!

Steve and I divided tasks differently this time. I had eleven students, while Steve had 24 students in two different sections of cartography. The only way we could think to mesh our three classes was if my students were divided into four teams of three or two students each, who would take on the writing of the reports on four disasters and the web design of the overall projects. Steve's two classes would be divided into eight teams with three students each. One team from each of his two classes was paired with each team from my class.

My class' teams were to decide what they needed in maps for their pages and then communicate their requirements and a list of sources for appropriate base maps to their Chico colleagues. The Chico teams would then compete to create maps for the Long Beach projects, with the Long Beach teams to decide which of the Chico maps were to be included in their projects.

Meanwhile, one of my class teams, the one working on the Oakland Firestorm of 1991, had a member who was also in Judith Tyner's advanced cartography course at Long Beach. Our shared student asked if she could team up with another student in Judy's course to create an animated cartography and movie project to illustrate the progress of the Oakland fire. Judy and I agreed, setting up a rather interesting collaboration between these two students in two Long Beach courses, as well as with two classes up in Chico.

The results of all this were pretty spectacular. The Long Beach hazards course home page pointed to the four web reports. Three of them are still active as the students have not yet graduated: The Koyna Dam earthquake, the collapse of the San Francis Dam, and the Santa Ana River floods of 1862 and 1938. The Santa Ana floods report is typical: A map dominates the home page. From the home page, you're led to an introductory overview, which leads to separate discussions of the 1862 flood and the 1938 event, both featuring maps of the extent of the flooding. From the overview page, you can also access several topics related to the physical and social geography of the floods, such as eyewitness accounts.

There were a raft of difficulties and sobering "learning opportunities" along the way. The biggest problem was in the sequencing of two major assignments in my class. My students had to do a collaborative web report and an individual annotated bibliography assignment. Thinking that the web report would take a lot of time, I scheduled it for later in the semester, in early May, and Steve, then, made the map assignments for the project earlier, in April.

I had thought that my students would be working steadily all semester on their web reports and have their list of needed maps ready for the Chico students quite early on. Silly me! I did not anticipate how much they would obsess on their annotated bibliographies, which were due in early April, foregoing even looking at the group projects until after the bibliographies were safely turned in. This stranded the increasingly worried Chico students with a narrower and narrower window to do their assignments for Steve to grade. E-mail exchanges among the linked student teams began to get pretty testy, each group resorting to copying Steve and me on their correspondence. Steve and I were trying to ride herd on our charges, and things were pretty panicky towards the end. On a positive note, this time, there were no problems with students scanning copyrighted material to place on the web: All graphics consisted of links to someone else's web page, the maps done by the Chico students, and old photographs of a vintage no longer covered by copyright.

If we ever decide to do something this taxing again, we'll certainly be a lot more careful about the sequencing of assignments to avoid logistical problems of student procrastination set off by another, competing assignment. We would probably make the web reports due about a month earlier in the semester and delay major individual assignments until after the web reports were done. We would create more mini-deadlines leading up to the major web report, such as a date-certain to show us the list of maps the hazards students will need quite early on so that they can be handed off to their cartography colleagues with a longer lead time for them to do their work.

All said, however, the web reports are quite nicely done. The hazards students in 2003 and the cartography students in 1998 came away with web- authoring skills, as well as the regular content of their courses. The CSULB students in the Oakland Firestorm group from both my hazards course and Judy's cartography course stayed together as a collaborating group. They went on to present their work at the Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Education this November, where their poster and movie caught the eye of a Los Angeles Times reporter, who wrote extensively about their work in his story on the conference! Above all, this exercise fostered an atmosphere of undergraduate research in these classes and, in the case of the Oakland Firestorm group, led to professional dissemination of their results and media coverage.

For anyone interested in having students do web reports, I have created a web page on how to code in HTML and how to upload web pages into web accounts through FTP. This is available at https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/geography/gdep/html.html.

The web reports for the S/03 course will be accessible from the CSULB hazards course home page, at least until the students graduate and their accounts are suspended: https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog458558/.

Maintained by Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue
First placed on the web: 04/24/04
Last revised: 04/24/04