I love collaborative learning and to be engaged in different communities of practice. For me it is a big part of my learning to process topics and content together with others. It makes me learn more and gives me a deeper understanding.
http://www.enzen.se/upplevelsebaserat-larande/
But is collaborative learning and learning in communities, easy or not?
I would say, it is not easy.
First, collaborative work is hard to manage for those taking part in it.
You need to be able to:
- listen
- reflect on other members way of thinking
- unpretentious
- creative
- fail
- take the time needed
- be worshipful to the members in the group
Second, in a perspective of education there is a conflict between collaborative work and individual grades based on collaborative work. It is important to think through the arguments and to describe how the collaborative work is related to the individual assessment and grade.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042811030205
Though, in work life and in a global perspective, for example to reach UN: s 17 goals for sustainable development, it is important to know collaborative learning. And for your life long learning you need to know the possibilities with learning in communities and to have a personal learning network to relay on for developing your skills in different areas.
Goal 4 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs (un.org)
Thanks to digital tools there are a lot of possibilities to arrange both a virtual workplace where you can share content, work in process and present collaborative work to others. Examples are Mural, Gathertown or MS Teams.
MURAL is a digital-first visual collaboration platform | MURAL
Gather | A better way to meet online.
Video Conferencing, Meetings, Calling | Microsoft Teams
The digital tools also give the opportunity to arrange collaborative learning regardless of time and space and even to let students from universities in different countries work together.
Looking at myself, I have a personal learning network with several communities of practice. My communities depend on area of interest and the communities are both online and at site.
https://www.schoology.com/blog/personal-learning-network-pln-benefits-tools-and-tactics
https://www.communityofpractice.ca/background/what-is-a-community-of-practice/
One is the community around the Makerspace, where we both learn from each other and together. This community is both online and on site and with social media the community can share and learn from each other regardless of time and space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture
An occasion when I have been part in real collaborative learning that helped me move forward in my thinking was when I worked together with the mathematics teachers in primary and secondary school in Luleå on the topic how to involve coding in mathematics from school year 1 to school year 9. In this group it was important to listen to each other, to fail, be unpretentious and be creative. During the process, we had to dig into different levels in both coding and mathematical skills, both among the teachers and students. We worked agile and learned together from the challenges we had. This way of collaborative learning made me aware of how important it is to have members with different levels in a learning group and how important it is to accept failure during the learning process.
