4. COLLABORATIVE INTERACTIONS IN SUPPORT OF LEARNING: MODELS, METAPHORS AND MANAGEMENT
4.4 POLICIES FOR MANAGING LEARNING ACTIVITIES
The tools for collaborative learning activities are only effective if they are put to good use. Just setting up a Listserv for a class does not ensure that it will have any educational use or redeeming value. It must be put to the right use and monitored to ensure that it is properly used. In this section we will look at some of these uses and ways of monitoring and managing the collaboration to ensure that learning objectives are being met.
As indicated in Figure 4.1, there are many areas for collaboration in education in addition to the stereotypical "group project". A sampling of collaboration is listed below.
Collective Note Taking. Students vary in their ability and readiness to take notes in class or to write notes on readings. Collective note taking distributes the responsibility for digesting the information across a group and provides a collective set of perspectives that can be discussed and edited to provide a set of study notes that will be more complete and balanced than individual notes.
Collaborative word processing tools can be used to collect individual notes, sort by time and topic, and allow for editing by the students and the instructor.
Study Groups. Students study together discussing topics, explaining concepts to one another, working problems together, and quizzing one another. Dialogue tools can be used for discussion and explanation. Shared workspaces can be used for problems and illustrations. Quizzing can be done using chat tools. However, for each of these activities, the current generic tools need to be refined and linked to facilitate the specific activities.
Collective Information Search. The skills of information search and retrieval are becoming more and more important in education. Collaborative information search on the part of the students helps them to share ideas, techniques, and resources.
Students may search individually at first or they may divide the task among themselves and then combine the results at the end. They may share needs so that if one hits upon a source of interest to another that student can be informed of the lead. Again, generic search tools and connnunication tools need to be designed to make these tasks easy and efficient.
Group Projects. The intent of the group project is to allow students to work together on a project that involves more work than anyone individual could perform during the course of the semester. It involves the collective skills of dividing the project into subtasks, assigning subtasks to group members, overseeing the progress of the work, and finally bringing the parts together for completion. Rarely, however, are students given instruction on project management let alone tools for scheduling and monitoring the overall project. They are left to struggle with failure, missed deadlines, and inequities. It is here that easy-to-use tools for group project management are desperately needed in education. In a number of instances instructors are beginning to use tests to assess the abilities and skills of team members, to pre-assign them to roles on the team,
Collaborative Interactions in Support of Learning 53 and to use project planning and tracking software. A successful approach is to assign students to the following roles:
• Collectors who go out and gather interesting and relevant information from multimedia.
• Commentators who write commentaries and discuss the collections.
• Constructors who are involved in the construction of the virtual space housing the collection. (This involves technical and programming skills.)
• Curators who serve as managers of the collection, guide the progress, and oversee its progress.
Collaborative Exams. In many courses, after we expound on the virtues collaboration and cooperative learning activities, we then give a traditional competitive final exam. However, tools exist and can be further developed to create exams that assess the collaborative abilities of individuals while testing the collective knowledge of the group. These exams monitor contributions to group answers to essay questions and the division of labor in answering objective questions.
The many interactive collaborative activities of the students require new levels of monitoring and control. Listservs and chat sessions can go off onto extreme tangents, useless volumes of banter and filler, and sometimes destructive directions and flaming. Group projects can become resentful one-person efforts or total stalemates. In general, it is a good idea to specify as many initial rules as possible and to employ continuous monitoring and control to alleviate problems. Such rules and methods are listed below.
Setting Rules of Interaction. Umestrained discussion can quickly go awry. In general, it is best to avoid anonymity and aliases in online discussion. Furthermore, it is useful to set rules for entries and to assign grades based on compliance with those rules. For example, in a focused discussion on the pros and cons of some issue, one might require each student to make three reasoned entries, the first being an opening position, the second being a criticism of the opposition, and the third being a defense of the original opinion or a repositioning of opinion.
Roll Out Subtasks Over Time. Another method of controlling collaborative activities is to reveal and assign parts of a larger task over time. For example, the first step might be to assign a brainstorming task to the group, then an evaluation of possible alternatives, then a decision of the preferred alternative, and so on until the final report is turned in. Scheduling helps to structure the task, reduce procrastination, keep milestones on a timely basis, and even out distribution of work. The down side is that this entails additional work on the part of the instructor. However, much of this may be handled automatically with assignment tools, as in HyperCourseware, that distribute materials at predetermined times.
Rotating Exposure to Information. Collaboration can also be controlled by rotating the exposure of materials among the members of a group in a set order. In a three-person group, for example, initial input from Student A could be handed to
54 The Digital University - Building a Learning Community Student B, B's initial input to C, and C's to A. After each has reviewed the initial input and modified it, it would be handed to the third student. A round robin approach ensures that all students are active in the collaborative process and routing tools help to structure and subdivide the process.
Continuous Monitoring of Group Interactions. It is assumed in the new electronic educational environment that many, if not all, collaborative interactions leave records in a database. Thus, over the course of a project, one can look at the number of transactions and contributions by each member of a group. At the end of the semester the instructor can assign grades not only on the final product but also on the level and type of interactions by the students. Furthermore, during the semester, the instructor can monitor the progress of the groups and spot problem groups and problem members and plan interventions to correct the problems.
Needless to say, tools are needed so that the instructor can see at a glance the progress of each group and the patterns of collaboration. Figure 4.6 shows a mock- up of one possible system in which the instructor can select teams, members, and tasks for observation. Graphs at the bottom show effort over time as vertical bars, and effort by members as horizontal bars. Graphs among the members show the structure of the group as hierarchical, egalitarian or independent.
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Collaborative Interactions in Support of Learning 55