Hello everyone,

 

The past weeks have been as exciting as the previous ones. This time have we worked extensively with collaborative learning, learning communities and as well with some tools that could be used in working collaboratively. Actually, previous to this course, have I not worked all that much collaboratively even though I have taken courses at the University with PBL-basis and studied some distance courses (where the work has mainly been carried out individually). During the past weeks however have we been working collaboratively and I think that it has gone quite well in the sense that we have got a lot of work done in an otherwise very busy time schedule for all of our group members. In this collaborative work have we used a completely new tool for me, namely Coggle. In my opinion, this tool is quite effective and easy to handle when working in a group but I do not find the resulting image all that appealing, esthetically speaking. This is not a critique directed towards any team member but just something which I find to be lacking with this application. While working with our presentation did we use a type of a brainstorming procedure. I think that the literature was quite helpful in this regard by providing us with suggestions for issues to look out for and how to solve them. The most interesting article for these weeks was Brindley et al. article from 2009 “Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment” since it was very comprehensive and straightforward in its presentation.

 

The greatest lesson to be learnt working collaboratively, at least in my opinion, is that there could be a risk that some team member do more work than some others and that unnecessary compromises could be a resultant fact of working together with several different people with different backgrounds. I think that we have handle this factor quite well in our group and it seems that we have all had a congenial view on how to proceed, on what to do and how to do it. But, maybe this could also be due to the task to be achieved? It is not as if our project deals with life-and-death kind of situation, merely something that can be easily executed together. But what if the task was to be of extreme importance for our future careers and we have different suggestions of what is the best approach? I think that those are the real issues are present or at least could be present in a collaborative work. Fortunately we did not have to deal with such types of situations. This could equally give rise to frustration in the very same way that online learners can become frustrated with collaborative learning (see Capdeferro et al. 2012:26 ff.).

 

All the best,

 

Anders