My reflection today is about how we can collaborate in an online environment. To be honest, our reaction to COVID was the best we were able to do in those circumstances, but it was not the best. It’s difficult to migrate a face-to-face class to the Internet inmediatly without consecuences. Is it possible to follow a session of 1 or 2 ours online without loosing attention? No it is not. There are plenty of studies [1] recomending (related to videos) to be no more than 8-10 minutes long.
Related to this and to PLN in communities, I believe we are also going wrong try to migrate online the face-to-face strategies. The software development ecosystem has dozens of years of experience in this field, and has already made the same mistakes. Fortunantely, most of them have been erradicated.
The first example of sofware developing communities online is the Free Software Community. Every project of sofware classified as Free Sofwate (see [2]) has a community of developpers around the world. They even don’t know each other because they use a pseudonym. There are a lof of informatics that don’t like too much face-to-face interaction, so they communicate using a mailing list (see [3]). The best example of this is the kernel of Linux, developped by some famous programmers like Mad Dog (real name: Jon Hall) and RMS (real name: Richard Stallman), but mostly developed by anonymous users.
Agile methodologies
Contrary to this face-to-face avoidance, there is an “Agile Manifesto” [4], one of whose principles is that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation“.
One example of this is SCRUM [5]. In SCRUM, there is a daily meeting (daily scrum) limited to (max.) 15 minutes and focused on inspecting progress towards the sprint goal, which is planned for 30 days. No detailed discussions should happen during the daily scrum. Once over, individual members can discuss issues in detail, often known as a ‘breakout session’ or an ‘after party’.
Conclusions
Returning to collaborative online learning, we don’t need to have face-to-face interactions of students. Collaborative learning can also take place asyncronously. Does it makes sense to have face-to-face meetings? Probably yes, but not for discussions, which are more efficient by mail, because people have time to think what to say and to find resources. Online environments are different to campus, and that’s something we have to realise.
References
- Guo, P. J., Kim, J., y Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of mooc videos. En: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50)
- Free Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
- Mailing list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list
- Agile manifesto. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
- Schwaber K. (1997) SCRUM Development Process. In: Sutherland J., Casanave C., Miller J., Patel P., Hollowell G. (eds) Business Object Design and Implementation. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0947-1_11
