Two very
busy weeks on topic 3. Co-leading this topic was a little bit more work than
expected and I was heavily involved in learning about collaboration and
collaborating myself.
Looking
into my last blog post I ended up with being really glad that we have such a
good working group with “sharing ideas/thoughts/resources”. And I was looking
forward to this topic 3 on collaborative learning to learn how to work together
more intensively.
Was it a “more intensive learning” this time?
During the
last two weeks in topic 3 we managed to focus and reduce our topics of interest
and started discussing/collaborating on specific topics. So much more than just
sharing ideas/resources. How great!
What factors enhanced our collaborative
learning experience in PBL10?
Brindley/Blaschke/Walti (2009) offer a list of practical
implications on the institutional side to improve the quality of group
collaboration and to increase the likelihood of student participation (besides
grading!).
Many of these
implications can be transferred on our collaborative work in PBL or ONL,
especially worth mentioning for me are:
- Scaffolding/giving a framework: It cannot be taken for granted, that everybody knows how to work collaborative in group works. Our PBL facilitators managed to offer us a scaffold for learning, getting in real discussions and taking over the responsibility for our individual and group learning process.
- Establishing an effective learning community: During the weeks in our PBL we were able to build up a trusting relationship with each other. Building up this feeling is supported by competition-free zone: we do not need to strive for grades, reputation, prestige or even money/public or private subsidies. Another important point for building up trust and relationship are the explicit statements about everyone`s idea being valued and prevention of unreflected inappropriate criticism (like in ONL where our comments on blogs are first monitored...)
- Sufficient time: I really appreciate that we had sufficient time for collaborative learning activities (discussions during meeting and working on our padlet) during topic 3.
Furthermore,
I am really thankful for the opportunity working with such open-minded and
creative people in our PBL10!
Take aways from topic 3 for direct transfer in my
work?
We are in
the process of restructuring the learning design of one of our part-time study
programs in my department. In many 4-month lasting module students read study
material, answer online questions and get feedback (both individually), work in
groups on projects (project-based learning) and present solutions/concepts,
etc. in-class when meeting at the end of the module.
Etienne
Wenger emphasis in his paper about Communities of practice and social
learning systems
that learning in social systems or contexts like in communities needs two
elements:
- Participating - direct engagement in activities, conversations, reflections, …. and
- constantly producing artifacts - like words, concepts, stories, documents, etc.
Helpful ideas
how to enhance student participation can be found at Cornell
University/Center for Teaching Innovation.
I think the
second point is more important to be considered for our future leaning design: constantly
producing artifacts. It can be very helpful for individual as well as for group
work to be “forced” to submit work in short time periods. Like in ONL, where groups
have to present their work every two weeks, we write individual blogs and commenting
others blogs. Constantly producing …. 😊
In our PBL
group we have focused on collaboration and not worked so much on the PLN. I am
looking forward to read about PLN in other group works or blogs!
____________________
Hi Bianca and thank you for a nice text and for good leading together with Nina on this topic!
ReplyDeleteI really think that the key thing to be successful in collaborative work is to establish trust and relationship as you mention in your blogpost. If you manage to establish this, everything else will be easier. Prestige and competition is put aside and everybody is striving towards a common goal. Then and only then real collaborative work can be done. It’s “just” for the teachers to make this possible and not taking students’ group work-abilities for granted.
Valuable insights provided. Scaffolding and structure is what resonates with me.
ReplyDelete