[school-discuss] Collaborative learning (was: Learning Objects)

[Martin Dougiamas <martin@dougiamas.com>]

David Bucknell wrote:
> Martin, what do you mean by "structured" communication and why does it take 
> more time than switching resources?

There's an example right there.  :-)  Within the teaching/learning
framework of this particular mailing list you have 'structured'
the communication in a certain way by

  - referring to something I wrote
  - asking a question that prompts me to reflect and respond.

This is a technique known as Socratic questioning and is
an excellent way for both parties to learn.

This can be taken much further.  For example, one course I'm
teaching at the moment is a group of teachers learning about
constructivism.  This postgrad Uni course is divided into a
number of topics. Each topic is a week or two and runs
something like this:

  - the student reads some content (a paper of two);

  - they are asked to summarise certain key points and
    their reactions to these in an online journal (like a weblog)
    and I provide feedback on each entry;

  - they participate in a forum - each student starts a
    thread where they reflect on how the content to their
    own particular teaching practice, then they all
    "interview" each other about their first post.
    They can also rate each post on "connectedness";

  - they then take a learning environment survey that helps them
    reflect on things at a meta level (and also helps me
    understand how things are going with them);

The result is a powerful combination of deep reflection and a
more "connected" type of knowing (connected to the content, the
other students and especially their prior learning).  As you
can probably imagine, though, it requires a teacher to engage
with their students and this does take lots of time throughout
the course (as opposed to a week or two building content
and slapping on a generic forum and a test or two).

My LMS (http://moodle.com) is very oriented towards making
these types of collaborative courses as easy as possible.

Of course, not every course and every age level is going to
work like this, but this general approach (based on a referent
of social constructionism) is very powerful.  I'd be interested
to hear from you, David, about the courses you are working on
and whether you feel they might amenable to this sort of approach.

For more on the theoretical background this recentish paper of
mine (about this same course in 2001) may be useful:

   http://dougiamas.com/writing/herdsa2002/

Cheers,
Martin
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