Topic 3 was about Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning. We all have been there- taking part of a group work where communication halted. With social loafers that just want to hitchhike along not putting any effort into the work, or with a dominant person taking charge and decides pretty much everything themselves. Or, perhaps with everybody working on separate parts that then were just glued together in the end and you did not really learn anything about the topic besides your own part.

I can really say I experienced all of this as a learner, however since I have not been much involved with teaching in big classes I have not had the chance to try out different techniques to enhance collaborative learning. Also now in the ONL course, we have mostly approached our assignments for topic 1 and 2 in an asynchronous way, where we have been divided tasks among us, researched and reflected on our own and summarized individually, for then putting it all together in the end. For topic 3, we then wanted to test a new concept, namely synchronous learning. Which meant, that we were still reflecting on the topic by ourselves, but all work was done synchronously on our meetings. Also, the assignment ended up with a video recording recorded during our meeting, where we were reflecting on the different ways to work. A new thing was also that we interacted with the facilitators, where they took part in the video recording by reflecting on the topic from their viewpoint as facilitators.

For me personal, I really enjoyed how we approached topic 3 and the way of collaborating in real time. The group leader also incorporated a new thing where he encouraged everyone to “check in” before we started the meeting. During this “check in” you could express what has happened in your life, what your mind has been set on etc. I experienced that this helped to create a friendly environment and promoted the feeling of connection between everyone in the group.

This creation of a friendly and open environment built on trust is something of great importance for the collaboration to work. Here I think the facilitators play a crucial part from start, to focus on building a so called “community” space as earlier described by Palloff and Pratt (1999, 2005) and Garrison (2006). They stated that important elements of this space include honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness and empowerment. Before this is established, it might be difficult to be able to reach an effective and fruitful synchronous collaboration. Taking the example of topic 3 and for example the video recording, I think most of us in the group agreed upon that this would have been very difficult to achieve in the first topic, before we all have learned to know each other and build up a certain level of trust. When it comes to online collaboration, most of us in my group felt that there is a higher threshold to climb over to feel comfortable, thus even more important put a large effort into creating this environment. For instance, it is more difficult to read another person online, i.e. not being able to read each other´s body language, which create a higher level of insecurity. The importance to build an environment of trust and respect is something I will bring with me for future collaborative learning activities.

Garrison, D. R. (2006). Online collaboration principles. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 10(1).

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Palloff, R. M. and Pratt, K. (2005) Learning Together in Community: Collaboration Online. 20th Annual Conference on Distance Learning and Teaching