Collaboration is tricky; I believe that good collaboration is a thousand times better than working individually, bad bad collaboration is ten thousand times worse. When I feel that my collaborators put less effort than I do, I quickly become frustrated. Going into Topic 3, I felt that a majority of provided materials summed up to a massive advertisment of collaboration, and created an illussion that it can only bring us advantages, as long as we deal with social loafing. But now, while reading a paper by Lajoie and colleagues (2015), I remembered that a few years back I was a member of a Personal Learning Network (PLN) and it was a profoundly satisying experience. I participated in trainings with 5-7 other students, and we worked through various scenarios, in which we needed to respond to the needs of patients with amnesia (memory impairments), aphasia (language impairments), and other neuropsychological troubles. We took turns and played roles of patients and, obviously, neuropsychologists; and we were always accompanied by an experienced facilitator. It was so fun and so pedagogical at the same time; we were all highly motivated and isolated from the world in three small rooms for several hours a day. I’ve never benefitted from peer-to-peer collaborative learning more.
This said, I doubt that I could ever engage to the same extent in an online course. I feel a sense of community with my PBL group in the ONL191 course, and I also feel that our levels of motivation are very similar. But I find it difficult to fully engage in a course that is so spread over several weeks and not packed into a more intensive form (e.g., a week of continuous classes and integration). And I also find it difficult to fully engage in a venture that is not fully real. I go offline and it disappears, however dumb it may sound.
Good collaboration requires motivation and self- and co-regulation of activities in the learning community (Isohätälä et al., 2017). But I believe that this is not enough. We differ in our social preferences, personalities and strategies in learning, and I don’t think that learning in digital PLN will be as satisfying and beneficial as non-digital PLN for everyone, and vice-versa. Although participation in the digital PLN may require more adaptation than the non-digital PLN (e.g., Garrison, 2016), it still might not work for everyone.
If you wanted to read more about self- and co-regulation in collaborative learning, please have a look at these papers:
Garrison. (2006). Online collaboration principles. doi: 10.24059/olj.v10i1.1768
Hmelo-Silver et al. (2013). Using Online Digital Tools and Video to Support International Problem-based Learning. 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 68-76.
Isohätälä et al. (2017). Socially shared regulation of learning and participation in social interaction in collaborative learning. International Journal of Educational Research, 81, 11–24.
Lajoie et al. (2015). The role of regulation in medical student learning in small groups: Regulating oneself and others’ learning and emotions. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 601-616.
