Online Collaboration – The Gift Culture
There are so many ways to collaborate online nowadays but what makes for effective online collaboration?
The NCSL wrote an evaluation/review of their online collaboration for Headteachers, 1000,00 Heads are Better than One and can teach us much.
They found that online learning does not need new models of learning but that it refines existing models and that clarity about this enables us to determine the types of activities and purposes.
- the behaviourist persepective looks at task completion through a sequence of activities, usually with a focused set of objectives or competencies. (the what)
- the constructivist perspective looks at conceptual development by building understanding of broad principles. (the how)
- the culturalist perspective looks at developing relationships through collaborative problem solving. (and the why)
Whilst this is about online learning, I think that it also captures online collaboration although it is noted that the first two theories could be undertaken without any collaboration.
Things that I have learned whilst running several online collaborative projects are:
- just because it is built does not mean that people will use it
- it needs to be as simple as possible. People don’t have much time to go online on top of their work.
- that online collaboration can be time limited – some projects stop once the task is completed, others continue.
- face to face demonstration of how to use the tools is best with films easily available to remind people of how to do things.
- clear purpose
Add comment March 25th, 2009
