The third topic for ONL181 was called Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning. The name of the topic, and the thoughts I had around the suggested readings, implies that learning is something better done in a social setting. I really haven’t read enough on the topic, but somehow I’m not entirely comfortable with that thought. One of the suggested readings for the course, an article called Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept (Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer, London.) Etienne Wenger explains learning as a social practice in a way that mostly makes sense to me. The communities of practice described in this article don’t necessarily define a field of knowledge in a collaborative process as I first thought, but this kind of collaborative work seems to require a lot of individual work too. In order to gain a sufficient understanding to have something to put into a collaborative effort a lot of thought and consideration is required. What I haven’t figured out just yet is how to work this into the group and social aspects of teaching that the rest of the suggested texts discussed. Group work doesn’t seem necessary for a community of practice to exist, though I suppose you could argue that collaborative learning in a group prepares you for interactions in a community of practice.
The discussions in my PBL group focused mainly on online group collaboration during this topic. My personal experience of group work is that it varies greatly. I’ve taken courses where work has been done in groups and it’s felt completely useless, and taken up a lot of energy. I’ve also taken courses where work done together with other has helped a lot, though in general I’ve preferred smaller groups or working with one other person (The PBL group for ONL181 has been quite an exception – this group has been fun to work with in spite of its size. But I’m still a little bit confused by the broad topics, short time periods and relatively little direction as this doesn’t really leave enough time to go very deeply.) For this to work, ideally I want to work with people I know well. The suggested texts for this topics confirmed my personal experience in that both the article by Brindley, Blaschke and Walti (Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M., & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(3).) and the text by Capdeferro and Romero (Capdeferro, N., & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(2), 26-44.) emphasises how important the social interactions in a group are. The fact that online groups often consists of people that don’t know each other beforehand, combined with the awkwardness of some of the technical solutions used for online courses and the time restraints that come with some of the reasons people have to chose online studies can, I believe, be problems that needs to be considered before adding group work to an online course.
- Image: An illustration of the group action of the dihedral group of degree 3 (D_3) on a set of 30 points equally spaced on a circle. Image created by Wikipedia user Jackkutilek, and used under a CC BY-SA license.
As for the PBL group work, a topic such as this became a little bit of a meta discussion. We also ran into a couple of technical problems after choosing a tool that neither allowed more than one person to work on the presentation simultaneously, nor provided sufficient backup services, but we did manage to get a presentation put together. Just remind me to always check how saving works and to make an extra backup, OK?
Intercalat-ed 