If you haven’t joined Classroom2.0 yet, do so. It is a great network of teachers, of many different technological competencies, all sharing and contributing questions and ideas. I went there this morning to find a link to a Mathcast that was happening, but I ended up reading a discussion thread started by John McCullough, which took most of my attention away from the Mathcast.

In John’s discussion, Pre-service Education… Social Networking, not., he states:

I’m a college professor that teaches future teachers how to integrate technology. For a couple years, I’ve been teaching my students the awesome world of Blogs, Wikis, and other 2.0-related technologies, not just how to use them, but how to integrate them effectively as a teacher. However, even though they are digital natives of social networking, my students don’t seem to recognize the educational implications. They don’t see it, and the effective integration typically has never been modeled for them, (and I’m pretty sure I’m not helping very much). In addition, trying to take “I’m a student” thinking individuals and convert them into “I’m a teacher” thinking individuals in regards to social networking in education has been a battle that I seem to lose more often than I win.

And John asks:

What do you think about pre-service teachers’ skills and knowledge regarding social networking, as well as pre-service education on the same topic? I would love to read your comments, suggestions, and experiences.

This was my response, that I thought I’d also add here on Pairadimes:

Hi John,
I’d like to share a few ideas here although I’ve never taught pre-service teachers.
1. First I’ll share. I have presented to pre-service teachers before and I have some links I’d like to share.
This includes my ‘The Rant, I Can’t, the Elephant and the Ant
‘ presentation I did to pre-service teachers and my newest addition to these links, Cindy Quach’s look at effectively using collaboration tools.
2. On the topic of collaboration, I think most of these ‘digital natives’ we talk about are very good at connecting to socialize and communicate with their peers, but not to collaborate and learn.
3. Digital collaboration is not intuitive and collaboration roles are context and purpose driven, not general in nature. Thus, learning intentions, purpose and expectations for collaboration need to be explicit or the contributor’s role in sharing and contributing isn’t clear. If these things aren’t clear, then how do I as a contributor add meaningful value?
4. ‘Ownership’ is key. I had a Ning network for Grade 10 Planning and it was teacher-driven until I opened up the forum for them to generate some topics, suddenly the site came alive. The topics varied from important issues, to favourite hockey teams, to a lively debate on whether ‘boys are better than girls’… but what happened after that was that the students started sharing more on each other’s blogs and class discussions.
With student teachers, I would think that generating the content of the site would be as important, or perhaps more important than with any other group since, as mentioned here many times, you want them to see themselves as teachers.
Hope this helps!

Reflecting now, I think my last point is incorrect:

We want ALL learners to see themselves as teachers and contributors to the learning… content creators.

A google document is a collaborative tool, but I’ve been a contributor to many such documents where others have not, and I have also been a non-contributor on a few. Putting a class on a google document does not necessarily make the process collaborative: It can create a group of contributors, participants, editors, and lurkers, but should we call that collaboration in any meaningful way, just because there is the potential for collaboration? What is the intent, purpose and expectations for the learners and contributors?How are they accountable for their contributions?

Things have changed and we need to change too. As I said in my comment on Cindy Quach’s post:

You said it well, “Most writing that is published electronically is, by nature, works in progress.”…A work in progress that can be collaborated on, linked to, added to, and elaborated on. What I really like about the differences in your three examples is that the roles of the contributors vary, and inadvertently you are teaching your students to understand that they can meaningfully contribute with and to others in different ways. A necessary skill in a new world of literacy and technology.

On a related topic, how important is the process in collaboration? I think the quality of the collaboration can be just as important as the quality of the finished product of that collaboration… but often the expectations for how to meaningfully participate/contribute/collaborate aren’t clearly defined, and seldom assessed. If we want to see, and teach, meaningful collaboration then we have to know what it is that we want to see, and clearly define that for our students.

If you know of any assignments or projects that clearly define the collaboration process, and/or assess that process, then please share them with me.

2 comments on “Collaboration, Contributors and a Comment on Classroom2.0

  1. The discussion John started is quite old now so I wonder if he has found things have improved.

    I would argue that you can’t teach them about Blogs, Wikis, and other 2.0-related technologies.

    What you need to do is totally immerse them in it, where they are forced to use their tools for their own learning while building their own personal learning network. Similar to how Alex Courosa and Dean Shareski run their courses. From what I’ve seen they’ve had more success than most. This approach needs to start from their first year of study and be continued until the complete their training.

    I’ve been invited to almost every University in Perth who does pre-service teachers training. What I see is our bigger challenge is the lecturers who are delivering the training aren’t using the technology themselves so don’t have adequate skills to either run these course for their students or help assist their students gain the required skills.

    I know my observations aren’t only isolated to where I live. So how do you solve that problem of up skilling the lecturers first? Especially when they themselves don’t see the need 🙂

  2. There is also something of a hurdle in transferring ownership to students. Especially in high school students, who have been groomed to succeed in mostly passive-learning models for 8+ years, the resistence met by more student-centered activity is that of an apathy bred by teacher-centered classrooms. Many students would rather (in the sense that high marks will be ‘easier’ to attain if the task is linear and didactic) have a teacher providing notes on an overhead or the board and a multiple choice test they can tackle by rote memory. The thought that assignments might make use of latent skills, interests and more reflective, personal judgements as to the quality of their own work is a leap many students (concerned with the flux between 93% and 95% and elite university admissions) are reluctant to make.
    My argument for kids that balk at personalized wikis, class collaborations, and varied, independant project representations is that “teachers and assignments who transfer responsibility for your learning to YOU are often seen as more “difficult” than teachers who are willing to let you “slide through.” I quickly follow that by telling them they’re not “sliding through” my class, but if they take that responsibility upon themselves, and worry less about the final “score,” they will be rewarded with the appropriate grade, and maybe… possibly…. ironically, perhaps, they might learn something.

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