Collaborative and cooperative learning

I enjoyed presenting my workshop entitled 'Collaborative and Co-operative Learning: The How and the Why' at Olympia 2 in London on Tuesday. We stared a little earlier than scheduled, which was a relief to me, as I had a cab booked to dash me across London and out to Gatwick Airport for my flight to Valencia. I even had some time to talk to delegates as I was making my way from the workshop room to the lift. Here are the slides that accompanied the workshop. Some are repurposed from other slideshows, but I hope that none the less they will be of some use to a few people who read this blog.

Collaborative and Co-operative Learning: The How and the Why

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

My workshop was an invited session, and constructed with help from Don H. Taylor, the chair of the Learning Skills Group. My main mission was to spend 70 minutes getting the 85 or so delegates who opted for my workshop to think about competition, collaboration and co-operation and how each might contribute to the motivation of learners in predominantly corporate based training environments. I used the analogy of the London Marathon and showed several pictures representing each concept. In essence, I feel that collaboration is more about inter-dependency than co-operation, but that both forms of learning involve people working together to reach a common goal. There was some discussion around this theme, and then we moved on to examine Web 2.0 tools and participatory media in training. We tocuhed briefly on problem based learning and creativity, and my closing statement was - think outside the box!


Collaborative and Co-operative Learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Keeping your head above water

June is going to be an exceptionally busy month for me, and what a contrast it will be to last year, when I was forced to put my feet up after abominable (sorry, abdominal) surgery. This June, instead of putting my feet up, I'm going to be trying to keep my head above water.... My first speaking engagement is at the Learning and Skills Group Conference at Olympia, in London. The invited workshop I'm presenting is titled: "Collaborative and Cooperative Learning - the how and the why" in which I will look at choosing online tools, creativity, the role of Web 2.0 and problem based learning approaches, and much more during the 70 minutes I have been allocated. As soon as this workshop is over, I dash off to Gatwick Airport, to catch my flight to Valencia, Spain.

I will be in Valencia to speak at this year's European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Conference, on the subject of "Learning Space Mashups". I'm going to be talking about my recent research into combining Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs to promote reflective and collaborative learning, and will be outlining some of the difficulties and successes of these projects. EDEN is a great conference for networking and hearing about all the latest European transnational projects on e-learning, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone in that field.

In the third week of June I have no less than 3 keynotes to present. My first takes place in relatively nearby Taunton, when I address the Association of Colleges Higher Education Managers event at Oake Manor on 22nd. Two days later on 24th I'm farther up the coast giving the opening keynote for the Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Portsmouth. The title of my speech is: "Lifelong Learning in a Digital Age: Inspiration and Innovation through Social Media."

My final speaking engagement of the week is on 29th June, at the University of Middlesex, where I will be one of the keynotes at the Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy Conference. I blogged previously about this event where I'm speaking on the subject of "Digital Tribes and the Social Web: How Web 2.0 will Transform Learning in Higher Education." It's a quick dash back that evening to Plymouth, where the following morning, during the VC's Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Plymouth, I will pick up my Teaching Fellowship Award. But... I can only stay until lunch, because then I'm dashing back off to Heathrow Airport to fly to Helsinki, where...... (but more about that later).

How did June get to be so busy? Well, don't look now, but July is even worse. I suppose I now have to earn my new title of Professor....

Image source

Keeping your heads above water by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

A balancing act

In two previous posts this week I tried to identify some of the reasons why students fail to engage in collaborative online learning environments, and also tried to suggest some possible solutions to the problem of social loafing. I thought Dean Groom's response - Why aren't they doing anything? - yesterday was particularly useful because it highlighted that there are differences between engagement in formal learning environments and informal environments such as massive multiplayer online games. I agree and suggest that it must be to do with different kinds of motivation. MMORPGS are designed with massive participation in mind and are usually more fun. Today I want to talk about some of the ways online groups work together.

Some previous research can shed light on these issues. In 1994 McGrath and Hollingshead showed that groups interacting using technology tend to take on specific roles within the group, and this often occurs spontaneously. They quote the theory of TIP (time, interaction and performance) which regards groups operating continuously and simultaneously within the three separate functions of production, member support and group well-being. There are in fact three types of support required by online learners (Carnwell, 1999). They are academic support, emotional and social support and technical support. I have observed with my own student groups that the last two are often taken care of by the members of the group themselves. It's the first one that is the sole preserve of the e-tutor.

Palloff and Pratt (1999) discovered that in many of their online student groups, individual learners emerged to take on specific roles in the support and group well-being functions, such as 'encourager', and conflict 'mediator'. They also saw that there are students who take it upon themselves to chase up other students when they have not been seen participating for a while in the online group discussions (akin to the student self-policing I mentioned yesterday). It would be interesting to discover whether such students would also adopt similar roles in a conventional classroom setting, but Palloff and Pratt offer no information on this. They do however, comment that the emergence of these roles is a strong indicator that community is forming within the online community, and that this mirrors the processes that occur in traditional community settings.

It's often the case that online environments mirror what happens in the real world. Online tutors often find themselves in a fine balancing act - they should be aware of these issues, intervening when necessary, but knowing when to step back so that the virtual group can self-regulate.

References

Carnwell, R. (1999) Distance education and the need for dialogue. Open Learning, 14 (1), 50-55.

McGrath, J. E. and Hollingshead, A. B. (1994) Groups Interacting with Technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Palloff, R. M. and Pratt, K. (1999) Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Image source

Learning space mashups

The open access article I mentioned in yesterday's blogpost Access all areas has been published online, exactly 12 days from the date I submitted it. The review process was exceptionally fast. Apparently it was blind reviewed by up to 5 reviewers, so it would seem that the review process is more rigorous than many other journals I have published with. My paper appears in the first edition of an exciting new journal entitled 'Future Internet'. The journal is so new it looks as if my article is the first to be published in it. More will undoubtedly follow. Here's the link to the pdf of the article and below is the abstract:

In this paper, Web 2.0 open content mashups or combinations are explored. Two case studies of recent initial teacher training programmes are reviewed where blogs and wikis were blended to create new virtual learning spaces. In two separate studies, students offer their views about using these tools, and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. There is also discussion about aggregation of content and a theorization of how community and personal spaces can create tension and conflict. A new ‘learning spaces’ model will be presented which aids visualization of the processes, domains and territories that are brought into play when content and Web 2.0 tools are mashed up within the same space.

Keywords: mashup; wiki; blog; Web 2.0; collaboration; reflection; learning

Wheeler, S. (2009) Learning Space Mashups: Combining Web 2.0 Tools to Create Collaborative and Reflective Learning Spaces. Future Internet. 1 (1), 3-13.

Image source

Sharing spaces

When Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) began to take hold in teaching circles in the 1980s, personal computers were still largely stand-alone, and the World Wide Web was little more than a twinkle in Sir Tim's eyes. Vygotsky was educated in the Stalinist USSR so his ideas of cognitive gain were inevitably tinged with communal ideals, resulting in a theory rooted in social contruction of learning. But how could teachers translate these ideas into authentic learning contexts? A seminal conference paper entitled PC is to Piaget and WWW is to Vygotsky revealed a glimmer of light. The paper was quite prescient, but also wide of the mark, because it was written in 1995. That was of course the year many consider to have marked the emergence of the Web into the mainstream of our consciousness. Yet it wasn't until the social dimensions of the Web began to emerge into mainstream use around 6-7 years ago that Vygotsky's social constructivism approaches began to be realised.

Now we see learners collaborating, corresponding, voting, networking and connecting using a bewildering array of social tools such as wikis, blogs, social networking sites, photosharing and videosharing services and mobile telephony. It has to be documented, and all of us are the ones who will do it.

Below, as I promised in an earlier blog, is my own small contribution - the first in a series of 60 second videos which will illustrate how students are using the social web to create shared learning spaces. In this video you will see that they are not only sharing spaces, but also tools and technologies (a sort of technological multi-tasking) which provides them with their desired and possibly optimised learning spaces. Learning is the same as it ever was, but thanks to the new tools I believe it is also subtly changing.

Click to play

Published and unjammed

I was very pleased to see that my article 'The Good, the Bad and the Wiki: Evaluating student-generated content for collaborative learning' was finally published in paper format this morning (Yay! -paper ain't dead - it's just feeling a little off colour). Co-written with the help of Peter Yeomans and Dawn Wheeler (no relation - she's my Mrs), it focuses as the title indicates, on how wikis can be used to promote collaborative learning - for undergraduate trainee teachers. To be fair to the British Journal of Educational Technology, and editor Nick Rushby - who is a jolly decent bloke and a superb editor (that's enough of that - Ed) it has been available on Online Early for the past 9 months or so, about the same amount of time it takes to produce a baby, ironically. I wrote back in January 2007 on this blog moaning about the length of time it takes to get something 'out there' and published, so I welcome Online Early schemes even if the DOI (Digital Object Index) numbers confuse the hell out of a lot of people.

This is the first of a series of publications I am publishing soon on the work we have done studying the use of wikis and other open content software over the past two years down here in the University of Plymouth. Another article has just been accepted for publication in the Journal 'Learning, Media and Technology - this one will focus on using wikis to encourage better academic writing skills, and examines writing as a social practice. There are also a welter of book chapters on Web 2.0 tools coming out by yours truly (that means me) over the next 6 months, including one in the book edited by Stylianos Hatzipanagos and Steven Warburton, on Web 2.0 Ontologies which I have just been informed will be published by IGI Global in February 2009. I've been busy, see.