What is the role of collaboration in understanding? This question reveals my social constructivist nature - how much do we build understanding through collaboration, interaction, etc. And if it helps increase understandings and knowledge then what is the responsibility, and how do we build in collaboration in learning particularly in virtual environments? And if it helps in learning, how can it help in teaching? As librarians we are often collaborators in teaching, so it helps to understand or at least considered its role in teaching and learning.
I like how Wiggens and McTighe break down understanding into six facets - application, empathy, explanation, interpretation, perspective and self-knowledge. I think maybe collaboration makes all of this happen much faster. At the risk of getting myself into trouble, I'm backing up this assertion with something Mary Ann wrote after we completed our group wiki assignments. Although, may of us couldn't see it from our perspective (I couldn't anyhow), she mentioned how impressed she was with the fruits of our labor (yey!) and how we were less likely to get to our level of understanding of instructional pedagogy without group collaboration. Being a student and never having taught, I'm still not totally clear as to how this can be measured, but since she has more experience in teaching, I'm going to take her word for it. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
In a virtual environment, I feel collaboration is imperative just to keep motivated. Personally, it is almost impossible for me to finish a course online without some kind of interaction. Why? This brings to mind Lave and Wenger's Situated Learning Theory. Learning is a social rather than strictly cognitive process. Although it's possible to learn without much interaction, don't we learn so much more when we do? I imagine it is a reciprocal relationship between students and teachers. To answer the question, "...if [collaboration] helps in learning, how can it help in teaching?", I would argue that teachers are better teachers when collaboration is involved. There is more give and take. In a sense, student and teachers feed off each other and garner mutual understanding.
I saw MaryAnn's wiki assignment as doing a few things with collaboration. First, while we each looked carefully at 6 articles, we got the benefits of seeing the articles our group found, expanding out exposure by 18+ more articles without having to do the extra work. Then, since we had to synthesize the articles in a summary, we had deeper exposure to our group's articles as well as each others' understanding of the topic (and hence further development of our own) as we mediated the writing of the synthesis. And finally we benefited from all the other group summaries.
ReplyDeleteI remember that MaryAnn commented that she thought the wiki was some much more productive than if she had given us the summaries to read. I think that a large factor in the increased understanding is that creating the wiki is much more active and experiential. Plus, the fact that the product (the wiki) was also an assessment of our learning made it measurable. And I think that we all took a little more interest in reading the final products because our fellow students took the effort to create them. That's not to say that we wouldn't have read about the theories, but it would have been someone less engaging methinks :-)
I certainly think this assignment would be less engaging without these comments on each others' blogs, don't you?
So there's my 2 cents on that! I comment about the need for collaboration between teachers in my blog, as its really about continuously learning how to best teach.
I like that you referenced Wiggins and McTighe's 6 facets and I agree that collaborative learning makes it happen much faster. I must say that I would take the wiki collaboration over reading all the articles by self any day. I really think that I understood more because of the wiki project. I also like reading how other students understand the readings,it usually makes me look at it differently.
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