Sarah’s Blog is about …

As I walk and drive around our island, I am increasingly filled with despair at the self-centred way that people throw rubbish into our grass verges, hedges and roadsides. Sitting in a traffic jam a few years back, I got out of my car and handed a crisp packet to the front seat passenger (a ‘hoodie’ in his early 20’s) of the car in front, from where it had just been jettisoned adding, “I think you just dropped this’. I am not so sure that I would do this in the knife culture we now live in today.

So this morning, as I listened to ‘Thought for the Day‘ on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today Programme‘, I was taken aback by the Rt Rev Graham James who talked about how technology is beginning to bring the best out of people in our society. In particular he based his 2min 30sec thought on a new book just out called “What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, which looks at how the internet is reshaping human behaviour.

In his talk he picks up on some of the positive issues around trust and cites eBay, which trades £1800 worth of goods every second, with people buying things they have never seen, from people they have never met and giving the money up front. He suggests that this demonstrates how the internet has actually built trust in the world that I perceive as increasingly selfish through the abandoning of unwanted items through car windows. But to some extent I think he is right. We only have to look at the way twitter has grown. Founded in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, it is based on the concept of one person communicating to a small group via an SMS. To be honest, I was pretty skeptical of it to begin with, but actually I use it every day for this very reason. Core Education, where I work, lives and operates in cyberpace and we use twitter as face to face folk might use the coffee room. We say good morning, share snippets of info from meetings and talk about the weather as others might whilst they are waiting for the kettle to boil.

My skepticism came from my experience of using online tools for learning and professional development. For this learning to be deep, I felt there needed to be a degree of asynchronicity involved, something that twitter is not best known for - for good reason in my opinion. People need time to look, read, think and reflect. And I still believe this to be true. However there is a different kind of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, which does not necessarily need asynchronicity for it to be powerful and even become life changing. Look at how twitter has been used in recent times to share knowledge and alert large groups of people to unfolding events as they happen, even to shape these events as they happen e.g  the Tunisian and the Eygptian riots, the student demonstrations in the UK, the recent New Zealand earthquakes, the demonstrations about religious freedom in China, the list goes on …

So when I think about learning through collaborative dialogue, I can see that this is a more complex emerging pedagogy for the 21st century, than I had previously thought. That the currency of new knowledge as it is created and shared in a synchronous world can lead to that immediacy of ‘voice’ which is as powerful in bringing about lasting change as the more familiar asynchronous methods I used to associate with collaborative constructivsm.

Tags:   collaboration1 Comment