Collaborative learning

Collaborative learning is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches in education that involve joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers. Groups of students work together in searching for understanding, meaning or solutions or in creating a product. The approach is closely related to cooperative learning, but is considered to be more radical because of its reliance on youth voice. Collaborative learning activities can include collaborative writing, group projects, and other activities. CSCL has emerged as a new educational paradigm among researchers and practitioners in several fields, including cognitive sciences, sociology, computer engineering. It thus constitutes a new trans-disciplinary field. The most resilient features of the evolving field of NSCL include an emphasis on collaborative aspects of learning as well as individual ones, an identification of social interactions as an important element of knowledge construction, a focus on the learner(s) and their activities, a shift towards technological environments that promote authentic learning, and finally, an increasing role for all technological artefacts that form a global network. People promoting NSCL generally target the acquisition of higher-order thinking skills, problem solving abilities, epistemic fluency and the collaborative improvement of knowledge within a field of practice. This demands the analysis of processes (rather than just products) within complex and authentic contexts. NSCL is much more ambitious than previous approaches of ICT-support in education. It is therefore more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of NSCL activities. Nonetheless, all actors involved in ‘e-learning’, and more specifically in NSCL processes, – from policy makers to everyday practitioners – need to have evidence of whether, how and when expected improvements in learning take place. Significant effort is required to provide systematic evaluation of innovative projects, the specific experiences within an action/research framework, the new NSCL systems developed, and so on.

Collaborative learning has taken on many forms. One form is Collaborative Networked Learning for the self-directed adult learner.

Dr. Charles Findley,Ph.D., began exploring and coined the term Collaborative Networked Learning (CNL) in the mid 1980's as part of the work on designing the classroom of the future for the knowledge worker.

Collaborative Networked Learning (CNL) is that learning which occurs via electronic dialogue between self-directed co-learners and learners and experts. Learners share a common purpose, depend upon each other and are accountable to each other for their success. CNL occurs in interactive groups in which participants actively communicate and negotiation meaning with one another.

Three important considerations motivate the focus on CNL.

• CNL is sound educational practice.

Researchers and educators have contrasted collaborative activities with two other categories-- competitive and individualistic. Competitive activities, for example, include those in which only one person can win, or where learners compete for grades, rank, or status, rather than when all members focus on achieving mastery or competence. Individualistic activities, for example, include working in isolation with no interaction with others, or when a learner interacts only with a self-paced manual or CBI, rather than when all members share ideas with each other.

The overwhelming conclusion of research in the goals of learning environments is that collaborative,cooperative goal directed activities lead to higher achievement. Overall higher achievement translates into higher productivity.

• CNL is sound business practice.

Much work in the information age enterprise involves collaborative, team oriented tasks. Learning workers share information with one another in order to accomplish common tasks in a small group. Professionals share information with each other, and learn something about each others' specialization in order to reach consensus on a common problem. Assembly line workers have increased productivity when workers learned from each other how their different individual parts of the task fit together to produce the whole. All of these different learning workers are engaging in activities which involve collaboration.

Life-long learning in the workplace is becoming a necessity rather than an ideal. The need for collaboration is great and will continue. By facilitating collaborative methods of learning, we could help workers acquire individually and collectively the rapidly, changing knowledge required in the high-tech workplace.

• Collaboration is a condition of learning in the information workplace.

While the worker in the industrial era factory learned how to manipulate objects and memorized actions, the worker in the modern organization learns how to think, learn and apply information to a task.

Workers need to engage in activities that allow them to approach problems from different vantage points, testing out assumptions,and redefining meanings,i.e.creative thinking in order to develop new viewpoints. Workers need to engage in the social,collaborative exchange of ideas in order to pose hypothetical problems, general hypotheses, conduct experiments and reflect on outcomes. Basically, workers are learning in groups to make meaning out of information. Not only do workers need to make meaning out of the information but in order to actually perform their jobs they need to be able to share that meaning with others

Criticisms

Critics of collaborative learning techniques contend that even though the techniques have potential for great results, the application of the techniques is very difficult to do right due to factors such as group dynamics, varying skill and intellectual levels among group members, and varying abilities to interact effectively with other group members. These difficulties can easily overwhelm the possible positive benefits collaborative learning techniques may have. Thus a talented, eager student may learn little to nothing and become disenchanted. The result may be the fulfillment of the popular phrase that the pace of public education proceeds at the pace of the slowest students.

External links

• MetaCollab.net - Collaboration & education - help contribute to a free collaborative encycolopedia on collaboration.
• Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook
• Collaborative Learning Environments Blog