Databases and Collaborative Spaces for Composition

Microsoft Sharepoint: Sharepoint and Writing Program Administration

Matt Barton | May 2006

• Introduction
• Open Source CMS's
• What Is an Open Source Content Management System?
• Why Not an Open Source Learning Management System?
• What Does This Mean for Teaching?
• Open Source CMS Conclusion
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Why Sharepoint?
• Sharepoint and Writing Program Administration
• Sharepoint and First Year Writing
• Sharepoint Conclusion
• Final Thoughts

Where we found Sharepoint most useful was in helping us administer our rather large writing program (70+ instructors, 9000+ students). What we desired was to enable these instructors to share the resources they generated in their own classrooms for use by all. We also wanted to pave the way for an electronic portfolio system for our students.

We began by creating a series of templates for building teacher homepages. Some of this content was dynamic, such as news, announcements, and contact lists, but other components were static—syllabi, assignments, and so on. The idea was that each teacher could put together a homepage either by assembling and customizing the existing content, or add his or her own and then share it with the rest of us. We would all work together to vet the new additions and work to make everything mesh with the goals of USF's General Education Program's efforts to improve the quality of undergraduate education. We were trying to implement an “open source” approach to improving our composition program; instead of instructors generating and then keeping their teaching materials to themselves, we wanted them to share their ideas for the betterment of the program.

We also created document libraries for students and had them upload their drafts to the server. Sharepoint's document library system was built to facilitate peer review and collaboration, and has features like “check-out” which keeps two students from editing the same document at once (a problem with many wikis). The document libraries also support versioning, which ensures that a student can also “roll-back” a document to an earlier incarnation in the case of vandalism or accidental deletion. Furthermore, the permissions structure allowed us to limit access to these libraries to the students in each class, rather than open to the whole world.

Eventually, we should be able to use this system to help students create and administer writing portfolios. Students would be able to select which parts of their portfolios they wanted to share, and how much access they wanted to grant to them. For instance, students could limit access to a document to other USF students, to just USF instructors, or to a particular person by giving that person guest access. Students could also decide whether others could only read a document—or modify and delete it.

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