Is this Emergent or Collaborative?

We were assigned a research paper that we will be working on for months. In my first class, we had 3 weeks to turn in our first drafts. We were put into a group with 4 students and we were supposed to review each other's papers. Ok, cool, but keep in mind that most of us, including me, have never written a research paper and there are all sorts of formatting hoops to jump through and lots of rules to adhere to in the writing process.

So, what did we use to collaborate? If I say, Google Docs, you think, ok cool. But it wasn't a Google Doc, it was a Google Spreadsheet. We wrote our papers and formatted them with MS Word, but then we had to copy and paste, and this is what it looked like:




On the right side of my jumbled mess of a paper are my two peer reviews.

Is this cutting edge collaboration? Should I be paying someone to teach me to paste my work into a spreadsheet?

I got onto OfficeLive.com and created an account and sent this to the teacher to show her the collaboration features built for Microsoft Office.



See at the bottom where you can add comments?

You tell me, which one is emergent and built to be collaborative?

After I sent this to the teacher, she didn't even try it out or create a free account. She saw that Office Live offers business accounts that cost a fee and then abandoned it without even trying it or realizing that you can create a free account and use up to 2 gigs. God forbid Full Sail get an account on Office Live to show us the possibilties. Maybe more schools would follow suit.

I cannot tell you how appalled I am that the ONLY collaborative assignment in a class about collaboration was using a spreadsheet to collaborate. This is truly disgraceful, unprofessional, misleading and unacceptable to be taking people's money for them to be taught this.

This is doing such a HUGE disservice to the students in this program. So many students don't have as much experience with computers and collaboration that I do, so many don't have any idea about cutting-edge collaboration software or how useless this exercise was. Many, if not most of the students in the program are teachers working in the field. God forbid they take this lesson back to their students and teach them that pasting into the cell of a spreadsheet is an emergent collaboration tool.

I feel so strongly that this exercise is absolutely disgraceful that a master's level instructor is teaching this to educators paying to learn emergent collaboration methods. In my opinion, it is harmful to the field of education and the thousands of students of the program's current employed educators. Not to mention, it is unacceptable that Full Sail is either not savvy enough to recognize the disservice they are doing or they don't care enough to supervise their curriculums and to ensure that they are hiring instructors who are well-versed professionals in the classes they are teaching.

My next class had the same exact thing, an outdated curriculum and a teacher who was teaching a subject that they knew little to nothing about.