What I take away from this topic is the discussions around Personal Learning Networks as well as the differences between a “network and community”. During this topic it was the first time that I actually reflected upon the meaning and differences between the two words. A network is for example, organic, changing, weak ties, flexible, while a community have shared goals or interests with strong ties between the participants in the community. In the Open Network Learning (ONL) course I see the participants outside my Problem Based Learning (PBL) group as a network while my group as a community. Another way of seeing this is as a network of communities since we all have the same assignments, but we collaborate and solve them different.

Based on the discussion I find that collaborative learning works best in a community like in my PBL group. Collaborative learning has much in common with knowledge integration theory. I see knowledge integration as the combination of specialized, differentiated, but complementary knowledge, and the knowledge integration process involves the actions of group members by which they share their individual knowledge within the group and combine it to create new knowledge. The outcome from knowledge integration processes works best in well-established groups when the participants know each other. Factors like trust and transparence are important ingrediencies to make it happen. The fascinating part is that my PBL group with eight participants started to collaborate almost immediately, like we had known each other for a long time. I have never before experienced that the group dynamic was there from the beginning. Often this takes time to build-up and it can be problematic to make a full group to collaborate with many wills. Two aspects that affects are group size and the role of the facilitators. However, I can’t put my finger on the main reason(s), but I find it interesting. The question is how to design this type of collaborative learning exercises for program students.

/Alwood