Week 6 - Etherpad Lite

I briefly looked at Etherpad Lite (http://typewith.me/) in Week 2's post, but want to look at it in more detail here.



This is a site which allows online collaboration. Each person logs in to the same Pad, and has a different colour when typing. I've thought of two ideas for class activities where it could be useful. The first is a "blind" conversation. The teacher creates Pads so that there are enough for all students in the class to be in a pair. The Pad names can be distributed randomly around the class, so that students enter a Pad with someone, but they don't know who their partner is. I imagined this for a lesson about gendered language, so the experiment is to see what sort of language students use when "talking" to someone whose sex they don't know. As the "conversation" continues, and clues point to the pair being boy-boy, girl-girl, or girl-boy, does the language change? Would the students use different words/slang/phrases? The various conversations can be shown to the class for analysis. Other students can guess if they think the writers are boys or girls. This could also be used with the students adopting a persona. Each could receive a card telling them that they are to pretend to be, for example, an 80-year-old French woman, or a 25-year-old architecture student. How would a conversation proceed with these adopted personae?

I also thought this site would be useful for writing exercises, either fiction, or autobiographical writing. Each student could have a Pad, and they start a story on a certain theme or subject. Then students swap Pads, and continue with the story that someone else started. Each student could write a paragraph, and the next student is only allowed to read the previous paragraph, not the whole story. For a lesson on Identity, I thought students could write about some aspect of their own identity (family, friends, religion, sporting activities, etc), and then another student logs into that Pad and writes about his or her own identity in relation to the first person's. This is a way to get them thinking about themselves, and how they differ from others.

These activities involve not just writing, but reading as they have to interact with someone else's text. Hopefully it would also mean that all students are busy with their own activities and wouldn't be chatting. The swapping of Pads means that students get the writing broken up into smaller chunks, and they get to compare and share their own writing with others. Sharing with the whole class is instant. You could even get different students to read out others' writing. The Pads have a timeline feature which shows all the keystrokes for the text, so it's possible to see if students have cheated in the first exercise by revealing who they are talking to.