Unintended Directions

I don’t believe the discussion of collaborative, cooperative, and competitive learning was a topic that the instructor intended as one of the topics for last week’s class. However, it was very valuable to me. I didn’t really have a good handle on the difference of collaborative and cooperative learning. I often use them interchangeably or together.

I then used my new found knowledge to view my online course. I found specific examples of collaborative learning – they had a big project and instead of working on the whole problem together they split it up – with four group members and four objectives -they each took one, tackled it independently then re-grouped and made it fit together. This is how I often see groups work and have worked in groups this way many times myself. I can’t think of many times where groups have worked cooperatively – this is much harder and requires much more interaction. There was, however, one time I can think of that my group worked cooperatively. We were in Tim’s Digital Video class and a few of us knew we like to work with certain people for groups (you know how that goes, as you get more into the program and meet more people and you figure out who you like to work with/who does their fair share and who you would rather not work with). Tim requires a group project and asked for groups of 3-5 members. Well a few of us knew who we would like to work with and those few liked to work with others that we hadn’t worked with before, so our group just branched out and we ended up wanting a group of seven. This was much larger than Tim’s intent, but he decided to let us work together as one group – of course, he doubled the requirements. Because of the large size and our comfort with each other we did work very cooperatively. We had lots of Saturday meetings and quite a few beers afterwards, but it was a lot of fun and we produced a quality project (check it out at http://itlab.coe.wayne.edu/srhodes/WSS/intro.html).

For online groups to be able to work collaboratively, there must be some ability to work synchronously I would think -- even if it is something as simple as a chat or skype. Speaking of synch and asynch, I have to go work on my special topic. See you in class.