The answer to this question depends a lot on your view of learning and what learning is?
My personal belief is that you learn things from a collaborative experience that you would not be able to learn in any other way.
Now whether individuals value that or not is another question - or whether they think that the effort is worth the gain . . .
Real life is a mixture of both individual and collaborative learning experiences. I think that creating a learning environment that eliminates either one because of cost would make that environment and impoverished one.
You mention that there's a large cost of the dialog in large, collaborative, online groups. I'm surprised that you did not play with the idea of the form of this dialog (given your penchant for asynchronous vs. synchronous). The relative financial/hardware/software investment needed to maintain asynchronous dialog is quite low in reality. The questions is, at what cost does it come? What do you gain and what do you sacrifice?
When I mention cost, what I mean is getting students to be involved in synchronous dialog. Asycnhronous dialog is much less costly in many terms, but group productivity may be limited. Therefore my conclusion so far is that group work is worthwhile, but that synchronous versions are too costly, and it would be better to go as far as the limits of asynchronous communication will allow and call it good. But I am only suggesting this approach for the mass production form of distance ed, not for small class size for specialized education such as graduate work. I am thinking more of undergraduate general education.
You ask: Is it worth the cost to do group work?
ReplyDeleteThe answer to this question depends a lot on your view of learning and what learning is?
My personal belief is that you learn things from a collaborative experience that you would not be able to learn in any other way.
Now whether individuals value that or not is another question - or whether they think that the effort is worth the gain . . .
Real life is a mixture of both individual and collaborative learning experiences. I think that creating a learning environment that eliminates either one because of cost would make that environment and impoverished one.
You mention that there's a large cost of the dialog in large, collaborative, online groups. I'm surprised that you did not play with the idea of the form of this dialog (given your penchant for asynchronous vs. synchronous). The relative financial/hardware/software investment needed to maintain asynchronous dialog is quite low in reality. The questions is, at what cost does it come? What do you gain and what do you sacrifice?
ReplyDeleteWhen I mention cost, what I mean is getting students to be involved in synchronous dialog. Asycnhronous dialog is much less costly in many terms, but group productivity may be limited. Therefore my conclusion so far is that group work is worthwhile, but that synchronous versions are too costly, and it would be better to go as far as the limits of asynchronous communication will allow and call it good. But I am only suggesting this approach for the mass production form of distance ed, not for small class size for specialized education such as graduate work. I am thinking more of undergraduate general education.
ReplyDelete