Week 5 Reflections and Observations

In the preface to Palloff and Pratt, they make the statement: "Collaboration. This is a word that sends chills up the spines of some instructors. For them, collaboration brings visions of students who resist working in groups, the struggle to create equitable teams of students, uneven participation, and the difficulty of evaluating and grading the products produced by a group." As a student, I can readily relate to this statement. In the online world, communication is more difficult, is visual rather than verbal, requires much more time, and is often asynchronous...so that the thread of the discussion is more difficult to maintain. How do you develop "equitable teams" when you know so little about each student? And, who hasn't been frustrated at some time about the student who doesn't pull his weight in a group collaboration?

Despite these frustrations, I have seen that collaboration can work more smoothly. Just from my observations, I have seen that as students are exposed to collaboration more, they tend to respond more appropriately. In addition, as communication becomes synchronous and visual, as with Breeze, collaboration becomes much more enjoyable and more analagous to a classroom situation where you can see and hear each other. As technology improves to bring the online world more in line with the ways humans like to interact, the more I believe online collaboration will succeed.

I found myself in total agreement with the process P&P described with building a learning community online; it's very much in sync with the face-to-face process: build trust, have integrity, and have concern for others. I also have directly experienced the process (in the face-to-face world) of the process that all teams go through as they collaborate on a project or assignment: normative phase, problem-solving phase, disagreement or conflict phase, an action phase and termination. I had heard it described briefly as: norming, forming, storming, and performing. The most significant statement made by P&P in this regard, in my opinion, is the fact that it takes TIME to move through both the community-building process and the phases of the collaborative process.

Palloff and Pratt also comment on the fact that collaboration has been defined as "the heart and soul of constructivism." I frankly admit that I have been struggling with aspects of constructivism; in particular the concept of "constructing knowledge". This sounds too much like the atmosphere of moral relativism that pervades this country: right and wrong is relative; what's wrong to you is not necessarily wrong to me. Therefore, knowledge is what you happen to think it is. I see knowledge as truth-based. We may debate right and wrong, but that doesn't change those things which are true or false. It would be much more worthwhile to focus on the fact that we are never at our destination when it comes to knowledge; we're always at some point along the path of "knowing" the truth.

While we will never have full knowledge of any topic, we can develop a degree of understanding "constructed" from what we learn (or are told) integrated with what we already "know". The point that I am trying to make is that there can be no fully common ground between individuals on any subject. Constructivism says that each person's knowledge of a subject is based on internally stored experiences and learned information which cannot be the same experiences and learning of others. So, does that mean that collaboration is the preferred vehicle for achieving a higher percentage of "common ground"? I've expressed my views; I'd like to hear yours...