Collaboration is key? My thoughts on 4 cases

[GraphDesProject]

Over the weekend  I have been watching lectures on YouTube. Despite only being expected to view key snippets  the lecture by Sugata Mitra was so interesting I couldn’t look away. He has been doing experiments with kids in poor areas of India where they had no access to computers.  Mitra himself is witty and entertaining but I’d like to see a deeper report about his results. May watch some more vids or do a bit of reading.
The key aspect here is that collaboration is vital. Singleton children cannot achieve as much as the groups of four or five. What is most startling is the short time it takes the groups to work out answers and I enjoyed the positive aspects of “cheating”! I did wonder though about the dynamics of the groups of kids. I had a chat with my 11 year old about it and asked him how he’d feel about this kind of work (which to an extent they do) – would he have issues working, say, with his arch enemy or would he want to competitively do better, thus prompting the work? He felt it’d be a mixture of both. I’m not sure that in schools, colleges or unis group work is so Utopian as it looked in the films.
I’m quite involved with homeschooling and have noticed over the last twenty years or so that what homeschoolers – or rather unschoolers – do is often used in mainstream education later on, despite there being a slight looking down the nose at homeschooling (amateurs!!). Mitra’s work just looked like homeschooling to me. Logistically, connectivism and online collaboration are necessary for many kids learning at home in remote areas (esp in US).
I also watched a lecture by Eric Mazur about the use of clickers in the lecture theatre. I’ve always been a bit dubious about this as a method, thinking it could be utterly pointless. But once again the collaborative aspect of how Mazur used these was interesting. He also went on to use collaborative course/homework. I’ve done this quite a lot with face-to-face university students and usually do get good results, helping everyone to achieve more of the learning outcomes. My drive to do this is often the need to get a lot done/covered in a short time, as well as the need to train in the employability skill of group work. Ironically, one of the topics I use this for is to research and define “use of digital media” through case studies. However, more often than not the students don’t like doing this – they seem to prefer doing work alone: or at least getting graded alone. The difference with Mitra’s children was that it was fact-finding for its own sake and a fun game. It’d be interesting to see an experiment done when there is something more at stake (grades). Ah, but perhaps this is the point – too many learning outcomes and too much testing in mainstream education!?
So the question for me at this point (because I am moving away from f2f to almost completely online tutoring in the next few months) is how can this collaboration be reproduced in online courses, like MOOCs and like the projects from my organisation, GDP? It seems that the groups in the two videos had very specific questions to investigate. What I have experienced so far in MOOCs is that the questions are broader, more generic, or contrarily more personalised to somebody else. Brief Twitter chats do get return comments, but it is hard to have a really detailed academic discussion in a few characters a time. Forum posts rarely get answered. So it’s a bit frustrating and hard to get any real collaboration going, though the courses are set up to enable this. Perhaps the vast number of participants is a preventative.
GDP projects are asynchronous – people are doing them at their own pace not in an organised timetable, which makes it hard to collaborate, though if learners are using a public blog, rather than a private one, there are potentially opportunities for working with other learners or even other members of the public. I’m looking to set up a Study Cloud area to enable at least some optional cross-project collaboration.
Also watched the MOOCs video; but so much has already been said about these that I don’t have much to add right now. I’m waiting for some organised, holistic form of certification that’ll mean something concrete to global employers. Otherwise they are for CPD or fun. I’ve signed up to do a couple of Coursera MOOCs later in the year to find out about the other side!!
Not sure what to make of Helen Keegan’s talk. Wasn’t quite sure what the learning aims were, nor how they were met, though it seems the learners had a powerful experience. Having filled out copious ethics paperwork just to research into my students’ blogging, I feel a bit wary of tutors doing whatever they like “in the name of learning”. If a student was so unsettled that he wanted to go to the police, I wonder if this needs re-thinking. Do the ends justify the means? Or am I getting bogged down by a side-issue?
 
Sancha (GraphDesProject)

[philtubman]

hello, re: Sugata Mitra, I’m a big fan but its worth reading these critiques of ‘rousseau-vian’ self directed learning to balance out the good feeling you get from Sugata’s ALT-C or TED talks:

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/negroponte-10-reasons-why-his-ethiopian.html

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sugata-mitra-slum-chic-7-reasons-for.html 

 

[philtubman]

ps i’d be interested to follow up your ideas on homeschooling furrowing the path for mainstream education in later years. Do you have any links or could you elaborate on this idea.

having spoken with Sugata at the 2009 ALT-C, it was clear to me that the idea of 4-5 kids working together was the key, and the problem solving inquiry based learning style.

I do wonder how well these ideas ‘scale’ or ‘transfer’ though. For example i have read critiques of Montessori practicethat point right back to her (ad-hominem) as the success factor. I wonder how much this can be said of Mitra’s methodology…

I guess what I am coming to, and how this relates to homeschool, is that I believe it is the ‘personality’ of the tutor as much as anything that motivates learning. I think this is problematic from a tech perspective as the ‘techs’ are trying to create ‘replicable’ or ‘transferrable’ pedagogic situations but they will work one year and then fail mysteriously the next, and then work again.
The ‘learning’ part of ‘learning technology’ means that suddenly all the rules of ‘technology’ (eg. replicability) do not apply any more.
This is a headache in one sense, but when we start to fit the technology around the tutor (ad hominem) as well as the learning context or educational content, we can stop worrying about trying to embed technology in the same way and concentrate on personalised technology choices that empower people to teach and learn

It certainly broadens the task of an LT, but I think that with the diverse array of technology choices, the conversations we have with tutors can be more along the lines of ‘what do you feel comfortable with trying’ and less the exasperated ‘but don’t you see that if you use lecture capture, VLE, [take your pick] it will be better for everyone’.

Its like taking the constructivism that eLearning bods cherish, and actually applying it to our own practice – ie taking our tutors one step at a time into their ‘zones of proximal development’ rather than forcing new technology paint-by-numbers style on peoples working practices.

[GraphDesProject]

I read these two linkss with interest….When I saw the videos I didn’t immediately think of educational colonialism (but it took my feel-good mood away and the images of abandoned hole in the wall booths was v. depressing); I was more interested to know more about the findings in a systematic way. It seems my gut feelings about the dynamics of the groups of kids was right. I’d like to find out more about the importance (if any) of WHAT the kids looked at. I also have had second thoughts about the collaboration aspect – so it doesn’t work with singleton kids??…but I have seen my own two do this on countless occasions (especially when the question is one of their own making, like how well did reviewers rate Skyrim or what does this toy/game/cd cost, or how do I obtain and work this mod in Minecraft etc etc. Oh yeah, and they can do regular schooly stuff like find out about a chosen river for homework etc. My younger son has found out all kinds of things by himself on his laptop – things I don’t understand or know are there. But over and above all of this I’m still interested to see some more theory about why this curiousity/motivation/challenge/playing works.and how we can get this across to unmotivated learners. And in answer to your other post – yes, I think the tutor – or the motivator of the question (which might be of their own making) is really important. In the Mitra context is is presented as a change from regular school, naughtily sending out the teacher, which of course is going to motivate them. As for scaffolding and motivation by homeschool mums, well that is being studied at the moment, I uberstand, bit too early for any reports yet. But my kids have a role model of a constant learner looker-upper so I guess that helped their ethos.

I’ll look for some homeschool/mainstream links. It is just something I’ve noticed over the last 20 years or so. The idea of unschooling was popular when my elder son did this (aged 12-14), letting people find out their own stuff and become experts. He immersed  himself in music design, completely teaching himself the music; and since graduating is a designer and musician full time (shameless plug as proof – http://youtu.be/Oy-hqZ389EI). He entered these communties of practice through his own efforts. It is this kind of allowing learners to do their own thing that homeschooling championed ages ago (tho they don’t all do this and many follow set curricula as if they were in schools). I’ve always tried to bring as much discovery learning to my mainstream design students as I can get away with. I’m not sure if I would say that successful HE mimics homeschooling or vice versa. Creating independent learners is I think the key to it and “teaching” the processes of learning rather than cold facts. I am not sure how much useful theory there is about homeschooling; much of what homeschoolers circulate amongst themselves seems to be a bit knee-jerk; but I’ll see what I can find.

I think your point about fitting the tech in is important – so much is brought in for the sake of a contemporary tick box. It has got to make life easier (as blogging for recording design processes does, for example) and I don’t like the assumption with TEL that older methods go. If it works then use it. But yes, I have found that getting personality across as an online tutor is difficult and can make the experience less warm. I once read that all learners are much more interested in the tutor’s private life than they are in the subject!!

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

[GraphDesProject]

Hello,

I have been scouting round seeing if I can find some academic papers on homeschooling and the best I have found so far are these two sites that gather research on the topic. ICHER.org was affiliated with the uni of Indiana (I think) but now seems independent and NHER seems to be led by the homeschool community. http://www.icher.org/research.php  http://www.nheri.org/ I’m beginning to plough my way through the docs (some of which are quite old).

Sancha (@GraphDesproject)

[Niall Watts]

Collaboration and group work are popular but is there any hard evidence that they produce better outcomes (than individual work)  for the students involved. See for example The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain

[jrconlon95]

I would be a real advocate for collaboration.  It just rings true for me and how I operate.  The interesting part of this MOOC is working to establish this style digitally which is definitely still work-in-progress.  You seem to be looking for evidence, and this book sprang to mind when I saw your post.  But then I am interested in transformative learning theory so may not be what you were looking for.  Plus also consider emergent learning – without the group nothing new would emerge…
Team learning: A transformative use of small groups (Fink, 2002 Ed: Michaelsen)
 http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Team_based_Learning.html?id=8S8efQkqeqIC&redir_esc=y

[GraphDesProject]

Yes, I wonder about this as I said in my earlier post. I think I often perfer to work/study alone (tho I do like to discuss ideas and throw them around with others to get more clarity). My younger son (11) said he felt groups “held him back”.

[GraphDesProject]

Thanks for this link. I am not sure I agree that nothing new would emerge without a group. However, I do believe in my own teaching and learning practices that concrete actions help you think with more clarity (ie making notes or visualising with diagrams). We insist that our design students of all ages do this in order to prompt more (emergent/divergent) thoughts. So, re my post above to Niall, I wonder if group work or discussions aren’t just another alternative method of making thoughts concrete leading to more thoughts….That’s how it work for me (as well as people giving me useful links!)

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

[ejarmstrong]

The Mitra clips are interesting – the focus on groupwork seems to parallel what I have seen in my children’s secondary school over the last few years but there it is more formal, with them being expected to pick ‘roles’ e.g. leader, time keeper, observer within the group for each activity. This does seem to work well in terms of fostering collaboration and peer support networks and whilst my child dislike some of the ‘roles’ they enjoy the learning – however now my daughter has reached higher education she struggles with the fact that the learning is mainly individual reading and research with little group interaction.

I think one of the hardest things online is getting the genuine feeling of social interaction – and creating our ‘small groups’. Is the risk with MOOCs you end up being ‘alone in a crowd’?

As GraphDesProject says the lack of assessment in Mitres examples makes it seem different to the ‘real world’ where this is often a key driver – and group assessment is usually very complex and controversial.

 

[GraphDesProject]

And also her TED talk http://youtu.be/c0KYU2j0TM4.

[Author]

Posts