Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

We know that there are many ways people learn. Not only because there are different things to be learned in some way rather than another, but also because people are different and learn in different ways. In a formal institutional education setting we may say that we have roughly four main categories of stakeholders: the students, the teachers, the administrators, and the decision makers. The four groups have different roles and duties, different social and/or learning networks and make up different learning communities. Each member of any of these categories has her own learning history and worldview that affects the way she is, the way she works, teaches, learns, decides. I have not written anything new or unreasonable, so far. Right?

People, have always learned in communities while most institutionalised education used to push learners to the other direction. We keep saying how humans are social beings – as if other species aren’t – and yet for a long time the only way forward to acquiring school and professional success was through individual excellence in competition. In the ancient Greek polis, success was to be had and acknowledged in public, but it had to be a personal triumph of some sort, even if it concerned the community. A free male citizen had to be good and virtuous and with his actions demonstrate excellence that would supposedly raise his status – and possibly also help erect a real statue in some public space in the polis. For a long time we have been nourishing competitive societies with educational systems pretty much replicating those old principles of personal excellence and reputation (a form of life-after-death).

With some variety, most of us in ONL211 have been educated within such systems of competition for excellence and success. All along we of course kept on learning in communities, one way or another. We learned from each other as kids, we learned from our families, we learned within small groups of school friends, fellow students, colleagues, but all that learning was not expressly acknowledged, at least not institutionally. I grew up in a culture of education that did not promote sharing or collaboration that much, but we anyway had some. And now I am a teacher myself and in my life I have attended countless lessons as a pupil and student, by a variety of teachers themselves shaped by learning histories, successes, predicaments and aspirations. Do I replicate my learning history? Do I reproduce ways of learning based on past experiences of past generations? Partly maybe; but through my trajectory I reaised that an element has been missing in institutional education, namely the “social”. Learning environments are (and were) supposed to expel the social personhood so that the learner can unobstructedly LEARN any way the teacher demands. This we know is still the system in many learning environments in more conservative societies like the one I experienced growing up. Still, even in such settings collaboration and collaborative learning takes place in some level.

What happens to us here in ONL211 is that we see collaborative learning as a monorail that is THE only way forward to efficient learning, even if we all agree that learners are different and learn best in different ways. What I see then, is that from the teacher-centred settings, we embrace student-centred collaborative settings. And we do this prompted not so much from our experiences as learners and teachers, but because self-righteous education experts tell us so. This is not bad, you may say, since collaborative learning works. Yes, it works, but it also comes with a whole set of different kinds of issues that we are not ready to face up. Issues like openness and sharing, personal vs professional, consensus building, conflict management, intercultural dialogue, social behavioural norms, and ultimately politics. In fact collaborative learning better fits democratic societies but there are so few around! We are at best capitalist (even if welfare) societies with some democratic aspirations. We are promoting competitiveness and celebrity cultures of consumption (success), and just add on top the seemingly progressive layer of operationalizing collaboration in education, and eventually work, so that we are all good team-workers.

Collaborative learning supports students to be able to perform proficiently in multicultural, multidisciplinary, and diverse teams, departments, companies, corporations, organizations, and multinationals. So in effect collaborative learning may improve some of our “quality of life”. What I would really like to know is if collaborative learning endorsed by institutional education will bring about more social justice, or if it will just help set and perpetuate more advanced forms of social injustice.