Topic 7 – Collaboration

When I think of collaboration in education, I am immediately drawn back to the idea of working in groups in the classroom. Research has shown that when students work together, their achievement and motivation tends to be higher as students mutually encourage each other’s efforts (Webb & Palinscar, 1996). However, with the ease of access to personal technology both inside and outside of the classroom, one would think that collaboration would be less emphasized as it became less possible to successfully incorporate it into learning. I think it’s kind of fascinating to watch how technology keeps adapting and changing and its uses become even more diversified, expanding our horizons and potential.

When I think of my own experiences with collaborative technology, admittedly the first thing that comes to mind is PSI experience with backchannelling. My professor had been showing us the tool TodaysMeet, explaining how to use it while keeping it open as he was lecturing. At first people went on there, posting things like, “Hi,” or “PSI rocks” and simple and fairly innocent comments. However, things took a change for the worse in terms of distraction when someone posted a funny, tongue-in-cheek comment. We all laughed, especially since the student whose name it was under was eating a sandwich and had his laptop closed. When we realized that we didn’t have to post under our own names, we were all doused with “Internet courage” and things got a little out of hand.

Just think, this was a classroom full of adults, all of who were education students; I can only imagine what this would be like in a room full of teenagers! I can see instances where this could be really interesting and probably quite useful for students who dislike speaking out in class, I feel like the disadvantages outweigh the potential benefits in terms of distraction. Students would be forced to split their attention between this tool and the conversation going around them, not allowing for full engagement. That, and I think the temptation to be deliberate silly would be too great. I know from my own experience with a PollEverywhere open-comment activity that all it takes is one student making an off-the-wall comment, and then everyone decides they need to be funny, which is distracting to everyone, especially you. If this is going to be used, I would suggest to any teacher that they review activity expectations with their students first.

I personally have used Google Docs (now Goolge Drive) for various group assignments in both PSI and PSII. I find it extremely convenient that it can be accessed by everyone any time they go online and that it can be used by all members at the same time; it saves the hassle of having to carry things back and forth and still allows a group to work on a project on their own time so different schedules aren’t a problem.  I think that this would be useful for students so that their work is not stuck on one computer and can not only be accessed on the school network, but any computer with Internet access; this was something I ran into last semester with students forgetting to save on their H drives and having their projects stuck on one computer that was being used by someone else. I also like that my work is automatically saved; I have lost my fair share of paragraphs from Word or Pages unexpectedly closing before I had time to hit the save button.

I really like the idea of students creating their own wikis. I like that you can observe the editing and collaboration process among students, and I think it is a really good activity for students to actively thing about how they are going to organize their information and check its quality as they build their wiki. I could see this being used in Social Studies, having students construct a wiki for either a particular topic, which could easily be expanded into an entire unit. This would also be an ideal activity to tie into researching by having students link their information back to its original sources.

Initially, students reported that they missed the face-to-face interaction that came with classroom collaboration as thing moved more into the online realm (Williams, 2009). However, technology like Google Hangout has adapted to address part of that issue. It is not quite the same, but it allows for more flexibility while still maintaining that sense of personalization. I like that students can desktop share while conferencing. This is not only convenient for students in the same class who cannot meet to work on their project, but it opens up the possibility of teaming up with other classrooms in different locations; you could potentially have two students in different countries teaming up to work together on a project.

However, as with any web conferencing technology, there can be risks, particularly if students make their hangouts public, which allows for potentially anyone to join them, which can also turn into a privacy issue, particularly if students are under the age of 13 and using this unsupervised. For that reason, I would say that this technology is not appropriate for elementary students and most likely not for students in grades seven or eight. Students need to be able to demonstrate that they can use this technology maturely and considering the ramifications regarding privacy and personal safety, that is quite a responsibility. So my personal recommendation for individual use would be from grades nine to twelve.

References:

Webb, N. M. and Palinscar, A. S. (1996). Group processes in the classroom. In Berliner, D. C. and Calfee, R. C. (Eds). Handbook of education psychology (pp. 841-873). New York: MacMillan.

Williams, S. M. 2009. The impact of collaborative, scaffolded learning in K-12 schools: A meta-analysis. Retrieved from: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/citizenship/socio-economic/docs/Metiri_Classroom_Collaboration_Research.pdf

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