Upgrade StorageTeaching zotero in big class with small groups
This post has some ruminations about teaching Zotero in a big class. I have no explicit questions, but comments will be welcomed.
In a few weeks I'll be starting a course where students will be using Zotero. There will be groups of 3-5 students, and I've been planning that everyone will register individually, and all groups will create their shared libraries. We will have 400 students each year taking this 2 credit course. Many will hopefully stay with Zotero, but many will not.
The students groups will create collections of pdf:s attached to their citations. Not massive amounts, but - given the number of students - enough to make using just one shared library not feasible (quotas, sync time). These collections will not be needed after the course and could well be all weeded out automatically at the end (they consist of copyrighted materials from licensed databases, but that should not be a problem as all the participants do have licensed access anyway).
For us there is no problem to make he students register individually and create shared libraries for their groups. But it is ok for zotero.org? Should I rather create some temporary zotero group accounts to keep from cluttering your user-databases? (It would be very nice to have something like a "course account" that would contain N students with M groups , and that would be automatically purged after P months.)
Mostly, the students will not be collaborating as a group when creating the libraries. One member will make a collection, then pass it to the next one who will read the materials and write notes, and then pass it to the one writing a report and creating the bibliography. We could do that by using individual, locally stored libraries and having the students to share them by copying exported zotero rdf's. But if we teach them Zotero, shouldn't we show them all the marvels?
Anything else I should think about?
-Timo
In a few weeks I'll be starting a course where students will be using Zotero. There will be groups of 3-5 students, and I've been planning that everyone will register individually, and all groups will create their shared libraries. We will have 400 students each year taking this 2 credit course. Many will hopefully stay with Zotero, but many will not.
The students groups will create collections of pdf:s attached to their citations. Not massive amounts, but - given the number of students - enough to make using just one shared library not feasible (quotas, sync time). These collections will not be needed after the course and could well be all weeded out automatically at the end (they consist of copyrighted materials from licensed databases, but that should not be a problem as all the participants do have licensed access anyway).
For us there is no problem to make he students register individually and create shared libraries for their groups. But it is ok for zotero.org? Should I rather create some temporary zotero group accounts to keep from cluttering your user-databases? (It would be very nice to have something like a "course account" that would contain N students with M groups , and that would be automatically purged after P months.)
Mostly, the students will not be collaborating as a group when creating the libraries. One member will make a collection, then pass it to the next one who will read the materials and write notes, and then pass it to the one writing a report and creating the bibliography. We could do that by using individual, locally stored libraries and having the students to share them by copying exported zotero rdf's. But if we teach them Zotero, shouldn't we show them all the marvels?
Anything else I should think about?
-Timo
That would a) have the advantage that if one group got over the 300MB (unlikely, I guess) that wouldn't be and issue and b)you could delete those yourself after the semester (if you wanted to. since Zotero doesn't delete unused groups, they wouldn't appear to be a major concern at least at this point).
Not sure if that works for you or is too much admin work, but worth a thought.