What Online Collaboration experiences did our students already have?

We created a survey (using an online survey tool - Obsurvey: http://www.obsurvey.com/ ) to find out what online collaboration experience the students involved in our project had before using e-portfolio groups as a collaboration space. We were interested to see if they used existing online networking (social & professional); how they had shared resources and information in other projects; how group communication had been done previously.

Some of what we found out:

• over 80% have used Facebook or social networking (what for? - mainly communicating, sharing photos & organising social events)
• But only 38% had used professional networking sites
• In past projects they stored information on USB drives; communicated via email or text
• 17% had used no online collaboration tools at all

We're already getting some interesting feedback on Mahara too (& plan to survey again later in the project to focus specifically on using groups in Mahara for this project):
'Mahara makes sense, it separates work from personal sites such as Facebook etc.....But it is unuserfriendly...why would they make it that confusing?'
Interested to see what they say about Mahara after they have used it for a longer period of time.

If you want to have a look at the the survey report, we've uploaded it into Google Docs so use the link:
Google Docs - Survey Report