Collaborative Spaces ~ the nature of dialogue
This page contains the key ideas explored during my two presentations and workshops at ULearn09 in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was organised by CORE Education Ltd.
From Social Networks to Communities of Inquiry, the sessions investigated how collaborative spaces are used to support a variety of connections and dialogues. We looked at the wide variety of possibilities available, unpicked their purpose collaboratively and discovered the challenges they present in an educational context.
The first thing I began with was the wordle compiled by Tara Fagan (of CORE Education) who was doing some work for the Ministry of Education:
'Pedagogy" Complied by Tara Fagan, CORE Education
I posted it before we moved to the tools, because I think it focuses us on the pedagogical ideas that should underpin the technology. For the tools to sing, this needs to be in place because although as Gary Stager, one of the keynotes says, ‘technology matters’, he is also correct when he says that ‘you can lead the students to the internet, but you can’t make them think’. It is in embedding these pedagogies that we are able to make these technologies engaging and enabling for our learners.
As we moved towards the tools and what they can do for learners, I posted this diagram, which is intended to pose questions, rather than give answers. Please take a moment to have look at it:
This is an attempt to give some meaning to online collaboration spaces and is a place from where we can discover, challenge and explore.
I had a fair amount of difficulty in placing the items in the graph, for example there are some aspects of community of practice to be found in professional networks and some aspects of learning sets to be found in community of inquiry.
In fact, I almost felt it was too confusing to keep in, but decided it’s important, because there are subtle differences in the spaces.
Why does this matter? Because the differences are not only in the selection and use of tools for the purpose, but in the manner in which we facilitate the collaboration spaces themselves, once set up. Differences can be to do with purposes, group formations, lifecycle and lifetime, commitment, responsibilities of participants etc.
I then went on to share some examples of how tools had been used to support different kinds of dialogue which have enhanced and deepend learners experiences, many of which I can’t publish here as they are password protected. However I can tell you about one …
A class debate on “Logging in Native Forests”.
Students were asked to collect opinions, from a variety of sources and post these, along with their opinion, onto the blog and then read others contributions, in preparation for a class debate. The teacher set up a blog and posted the task in it thus,
“We are going to prepare for a debate on whether we should allow logging in our native forests. Please look on the internet, in books, newspapers, on the TV or ask you friends about their opinions and then come back here and tell us a little about what you’ve found out, whether you agree or disagree with the opinion and why. Read what others have to say about this.”
This last bit is what brings the blog into it’s own. In this collective posting area, the information is made quickly accessible to everyone simultaneously and in reading the opinions of their peers or the facts they have discovered, the students can deepen and widen their understanding of the topic, in a way that that an individual students exercise book can’t.
Over the course of that lesson and the homework that followed, the students began to address the task. In the next lesson they formed into groups to prepare for the debate. They used the blog as a basis for dialogue in forming their arguments as well as a source of evidence to back up their position. Towards the end of this lesson, they then spent 2 minutes defending their stance to the rest of the class.
Groups were self forming based on similarities in their opinions, although they were signposted by the teacher to find those with similar opinions, by reading the blog entries. Other than the initial task outline being set, there was no real facilitation in the online blog. It will probably be no surprise to hear that not all the students made a blog entry. Also, some students just copied in ideas of others, without adding their own opinions. However, rather unexpectedly, there were a few who don’t like speaking in front of the class and they engaged more intensely with their blog entries as they felt safer presenting in the written form.
Coming full circle, this was successful because the teacher had planned the lesson and brought in the use of the blog tool to enhance the preparation, rather than thought that they should use a blog tool … just because. In short, sound pedagogical principles underpinned it’s use.
