My online PGCert group (for which I am a facilitator)  is currently studying a module on the emotional intelligence of teams. Had I not worked on the connectivism course in 2008, I might not have even thought to question whether working in teams/groups is a good idea and also whether working in teams/groups leads to group think and stifles creativity.

As a result of CCK08 I have been able to play devil’s advocate with my teaching group and question these assumptions that they might carry with them into the workplace – i.e. that working in teams is  the way to go!

One thing I have learned from Stephen and George (and others such as Stephen Brookfield)  is that it’s worth surfacing  assumptions, even if it means challenging the assumptions of CCK08/09 – rightly or wrongly. Who’s to say?

Many online courses now require students to collaborate, but we know that just putting people together in the same space isn’t enough? What should a tutor do to prepare students for collaborative tasks?

Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage model provides very good guidelines on how to prepare for collaborative tasks online. These are usually designed into Stage 4 of the model after it has been established that everyone has successfully accessed the learning environment (Stage 1), participants are socialising easily and the learning community norms have become apparent (Stage 2) and  information is being freely exchanged and a culture of open sharing exists (Stage 3).

Up to Stage 3 activities centre around helping participants to feel stimulated by and comfortable in the learning environment. Relationships are beginning to be established. Students who are not comfortable with each other and the learning environment will not be able to collaborate effectively, so it is worth spending time on the early stages of accessibility, socialisation and information exchange.

Tutors also need to decide whether the collaborative groups will be self-selected or whether students will be put into groups by the tutor. My personal view on this is that it depends on whether the collaborative group tasks are to be assessed and assessed for what, and whether it is a short course or a longer course. If the task is to be assessed, then if I was a student I would want to be in control of the outcome of that assessment as much as possible and therefore choose my own group. If it is the ability to work in a group that is being assessed then maybe random mixing of students is appropriate.

Nowadays I often work on online non-assessed short post-graduate professional development courses. In these courses there isn’t a lot of time for students to get to know each other, but as a tutor, having done quite a bit of ‘back channelling’ and being able to see the student log in statistics, its fairly easy to create groups made up of a mix of very active participants and lurkers – so that these student characteristics are evenly distributed across groups. Even then a tutor only knows what s/he has been told by the students, so there’s no way of knowing whether a very active student who you are relying on to get a collaborative group going, is, for example,  going to be on holiday or away from the course at the time of the collaborative task, unless that student tells you. So your carefully planned groups can still go awry.

Once the students have started the collaborative task, a tutor can do a lot to help them be successful by making the norms of online group collaboration explicit – so ask the students to inform each other about when they will/will not be online, when they will/will not be able to work on the task, what roles they would each like to volunteer for and so on. Encourage them not to be ‘backward in coming forward’ and not to be shy of taking the lead.

Having worked on online collaborative tasks myself as a student in the past, I know what powerful experiences these can be. It’s surprising how well you get to know each other in these circumstances, even though you are only meeting online and have never met each other face-to-face  - but often these collaborative activities do lead to long-term working relationships.

But I also know from personal experience that group work can be a ‘nightmare’. On my face-to-face Masters degree we had to do a group presentation and I remember having to argue for an educational philosophy to which I was  opposed simply because I was the only person in the group to hold the opposite view (this was about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and the use of rewards) – and everyone else wanted to do a presentation on something I didn’t believe in - so groups do require a lot of compromise.

This raises an interesting question for tutors about whether you would allow a student to opt out of a groupwork assignment and do an individual assignment instead, if they could make a sufficiently persuasive case, or should we insist that all students engage in collaborative group work.

I once heard Stephen Downes – at the 2005 ALT conference, describe collaboration as – “the joining up of things that do not naturally want to be joined up”, which challenges the whole notion of collaborative learning. But then David Jacques and Gilly Salmon’s have published a quite substantial text on Learning in Groups: A Handbook for face-to-face and online environments which really promotes groupwork.

So is it possible to collaborate online – Yes, of course and very definitely. Can tutors prepare students for this – Yes, of course – good teaching doesn’t change just because it’s online. Obviously there are things that you can do face-to-face (like a science field trip to study rock pools on a Northumberland beach) that would not be possible to capture in exactly the same way online, but an awful lot of what we do face-t0-face can now be done online.

The question is not whether we can get students to collaborate online – the question is whether we should. Are we asking them to do something that is worthwhile and that will enhance their learning.  Are we offereing them opportunities that they would otherwise not have? What is it that students can get from collaborative learning that they can’t get from individual learning? What specific challenges does online collaboration bring?

I don’t think there are necessarily any right or wrong answers here. If you want students to collaborate online, then there are tried and tested ways of making this a successful learning experience, but if you don’t then there will be equally effective alternatives that might suit the situation, context and culture better.

I logged in to the Ustream session this evening and what an event that turned out to be. The ‘leaders’, i.e. Stephen, George and Dave, did not appear for quite some time and even then the video streaming did not work, so we all had to decamp to Elluminate.

But what was so fascinating was how people in the chat room behaved whilst waiting for ‘our leaders’ – especially since this is the very week that the topic is about the distinction between groups and networks. I’m sure others will be posting about this and it will be really interesting to read about how people experienced this.

For me – I felt as though I really was in a group, probably for the first time since starting this course and I have to say, it felt GOOD! There was a lot of good humour and ‘rubbing of shoulders’. But what cropped up almost immediately, even if it was said in jest, was that we needed a leader. There were a number of volunteers! There was some attempt to try and chat about networks, groups and collectives but it was all very light-hearted and unfocussed. Everyone was waiting for the ‘leaders’. But the time was not wasted. it was fast and furious online socialisation at its best. It would have been even better if everyone had logged in with their name instead of a number, because then we could more easily follow up on people who interest us to try and make stronger connections.

There will, of course, have been people who were just observing and not posting and I wonder whether they ‘felt’ part of a group. In fact I wonder if even the people who were posting felt part of a ‘group’ as I did, and whether it also felt good to them. I hope there’ll be some posts about this as it seems significant to me in relation to the role of groups in learning.

So – did we learn anything in the half hour that we spent messing about while trying to get the Ustream session to work. I think I did. I learned that relationships, however fleeting, are really important to my learning process and that ‘feeling’ good about a learning environment makes all the difference to how engaged I am.

The group might have disbanded as quickly as it formed, but it was good while it lasted!

I thought the distinction between groups and networks would be important, but now I’m not so sure. I have enjoyed the readings this week (Week 5), but I think I have now decided that whilst it’s an interesting academic exercise to try and distinguish between groups and networks, the outcome will not be that important.

There is an interesting discussion thread in the Moodle forum, started by Ailsa with the title passion versus reason. Stephen has said that groups are about passion and networks about reason – and the thread has led to some ‘passionate’ responses! Is a forum, by this definition, therefore a group? Do we care?

Stephen distinguishes between groups and networks as follows:

1. groups emphasize sameness, networks emphasize diversity
2. groups emphasize order and control, networks emphasize autonomy
3. groups emphasize borders and membership, networks emphasize openness
4. groups emphasize additive, cumulative knowledge, networks emphasize emergent knowledge
There are also some interesting blog posts. Here is Wendy’s.

But I think Terry captured what it’s all about right at the beginning of his Elluminate presentation, when he said that teaching and learning can be enhanced by all three - groupwork, networks and collectives. Although it’s easy to start each of these up,  we need to think about why we use them and which tools to use for meaningful contributions to be made. PURPOSE seems to be the key.

From my understanding of what was presented and discussed, on the basis of my current understanding which changes daily (;-))  I would want to do the following:

1. Determine the purpose  of the group, network or collective activity (my ideal would be that ultimately this would be negotiable and jointly agreed).

2. Make students aware that they may be unaware that they are part of a collective -and discuss this, particularly in relation to their online persona and how this can be used by others and how they can harvest from a collective to their advantage. I did not know about collectives before reading Terry’s article, but it makes sense.

2. Use groups when we (I/students) want to develop a sense of mutual support, mutual responsibility and promote collaboration and a sense of belonging – using f2f work and tools that assist this kind of working such as those typically found on a VLE. Like Terry, I don’t see groupwork disappearing anytime in the near future and hopefully it never will.

3. Recommend that students use networks to link with others/sources of information outside the group, using blogs, photo sites, social networking sites and so on. I see ‘networking’ increasing as a way of working and whether or not academic institutions put blocks on the types of technological affordances students can access, there is so much ‘free’ software out there now, that students will just do their own thing anyhow. As lecturers we may as well work with them and exploit the benefits.

So for me, I’m going to get on with thinking about how I can work with all three and not worry too much about the differences.

Here is the abstract of an interesting article by Barry Wellman

Much thinking about digital cities is in terms of community groups. Yet, the world is composed of social networks and not of groups. This papertraces how communities have changed from densely-knit “Little Boxes” (densely-knit, linking people door-to-door) to “Glocalized” networks (sparselyknitbut with clusters, linking households both locally and globally) to“Networked Individualism” (sparsely -knit, linking individuals with little regardto space). The transformation affects design considerations for computer systems that would support digital cities.

This has set me thinking about whether it is possible to have a ‘community’ with the notion of networked individualism. According to some research done by Wellman – ‘the more people that are online, the less their sense of belonging to an online community.’ That feels a bit like this course.

He also writes – ‘With fuzzy network boundaries, individual autonomy and agency become more important, as each person becomes the responsible operator of her own personal network’.

Some questions arising from this are:

• To what extent are we responsible for other people’s learning as well as our own?
• Will networked learning lead to increased individual feelings of isolation?