An occasion when real collaborative learning took place, that moved my own thinking forward
From my experience, the real collaborative learning took place when the intended task has been designed more of an open ended, and provided opportunities for creative solutions. This kind of set up provided individual freedom in the group to come up with various ideas and to understand the given task from multiple perspectives. You also have more cohesive group dynamics and better cooperation within the group setting when the given task is more open ended than the close ended. One of the main reasons for such outcome is that the open-ended task does not have a single solution. Rather it has multiple ways/means to explore, investigate, and analyze the task from different lens. Such kind of task supports more inclusiveness in the group and the solution will be evolved more naturally with combination of multiple expertise, ideas, thoughts, and assumptions. The solution or knowledge to the given task is co-created and constructed on each other’s expertise, ideas, thoughts (Brindley et al., 2009). There is a less possibility for a single person who has domain expertise has a domination in open ended task problem-solving. From my experience, I learnt that such type of tasks creates a more enthusiastic learning environment in a group setting, where the involved group will not be merely a goal/task-oriented, but instead enjoying the learning experience that task can provide with a possibility of multiple alternate solutions.
Moreover, from my experience, I learnt that for solving open ended tasks, we intended to acquire and use different forms of information through multiple channels or new channels, which are very different than the traditional ones such as books, articles, or web information. We have a possibility to discuss it with our friends, families, or weak ties through social media channels such as different forums or blog communities, LinkedIn, or ResearchGate etc. I felt that learning has taken place more in an active form rather than passive form (as suggested by Kay Oddone in a video1), where group members have a possibility to share goals, continuously construct or reconstruct (or frame-reframe) information, perspectives, ideas, and experiences through (re)mixing and shared exploration (Bittner & Leimeister, 2014). In an indirect effect, open ended problem solving will lead to (or create) a sense of a community in a small group setting (Brindley et al., 2009). From two occasions I had been involved in such open-ended tasks, I experienced enjoyable learning experience, better outcome, personal satisfaction, better group dynamics, and creative thinking or learn interesting perspectives. Below is the list of two occasions, where I had been involved in open-ended problem-solving tasks:
- Writing a book chapter based on our own experiences from visiting many entrepreneurial companies in Silicon Valley region in a PhD course. We had a freedom to choose our own topic for the book chapter, sharing our group experiences and key insights, and finally adding theoretical perspectives to our insights and lessons learned. A really great experience
- Design an open-ended assignment in a course called challenges in innovation and design, where students need to select a company of their own, explores innovation and design journey of this company, identifies key stages and challenges, and explains how this company overcome those challenges. In the later part, they compare and analyses the similarities and differences of journeys of 3-4 companies in a group setting. Students loved this exercise and they felt enormous potential to learn about the area of innovation and design practices in a practical way. Here, the design of the task or a learning situation and the supported instructions (Brindley, et al., 2009) helped students to achieve a collaborative learning, which is beyond the scope of the assignment/the course.
I also experienced the same in ONL topics scenario exercises; where topic 1 and topic 3 scenarios are more open-ended and have a possibility for many promising solutions. I felt that we were more creative, engaging, and productive in the task in these two topic scenarios compared to the other scenario. This just re-confirms my experiences from previous occasions.
To conclude, from my experience, I could highlight few factors which could play an important role to achieve collaborative learning in small groups: 1) design of the task and learning situations, 2) clearly communicating the purpose of the task, purpose of the collaboration, and expectations from learners, and 3) good balance between the task’s relevance, task structure, and task’s flexibility.
My own Personal Learning Networks – how have they developed and how they could be taken further
My personal learning network has been changing a lot during the years since my PhD till now as a senior researcher. This must have been related to the change in focal topics/domains during my journey. This might not happen to everyone. But, from my experience, I could see a clear differences of personal learning networks during the periods of PhD education and post-PhD. My focus of the PhD was to examine how to use web 2.0/ social media technologies in aerospace product development context, especially considering the integration of products and services. I had spent five years on this specific topic, so I had an enough time to explore, interact, build, and nurture my contacts into leaning networks. Sometimes this has facilitated by face-to-face meetings in the form of PhD courses, workshops, conferences, study visits etc., and continued afterwards in the form of online meetings or through a virtual contact in the cyber world such as Facebook, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, or discussion forums, etc. Other times it has started off online meetings through weak ties and led to form strong ties over the time. So, from my experience, the initiation of personal learning networks can be facilitated either by f2f or technology, and overtime intertwin through several different forms (as also highlighted by Kay Oddone in a video1). The development of these networks has not been happened in one or several instances of interactions. It started with a preliminary interaction and evolved into a learning network over time with series of interactions, knowledge sharing, and collaborative activities. Even the actors in these networks had also different levels of intensity of interactions over time; sometimes all actors were active, and few times only some were active. I am still carrying these personal networks from my PhD, where we are engaging in different forms based on the need or type of collaborative activities.
But this can be very different after post-PhD period, where I did not have a similar research focus, involved in multiple topics/areas with different domain experts. It is some kind of a transition period from network perspective. Here I did not experience a privilege of involving, developing, and maintaining a single learning network as a PhD student, but rather need to be involved in different communities in a short time frame and making sure that they will be nurtured over time. I felt that this could be challenging from many means. But perhaps this should be the way as one grows in the professional career. You need to be faster and efficient in both engaging and maintaining multiple learning networks at the same time.
Reflect on how I can use technologies to enable my own networks for learning processes
Technologies are definitely key enablers for managing and expanding personal learning networks. It could help in identifying weak ties in a continuous manner, in developing weak ties to more strong ties, and in supporting several activities to continuously manage the network. Social media technologies—with capabilities to leverage informal connections and networks, and capabilities for collective creation and maintenance of information and knowledge in different formats such as text, pictures, videos, and combinations (Chirumalla, 2013)—provide enormous new possibilities to organize and manage own personal learning networks. With the power of online personal networks, it is possible to create a social space to continuously propose, discuss, combine, remix, and recontextualize of ideas, knowledge, and information (as suggested by Kay Oddone in a video1). Moreover, you could literally connect anyone at anytime from anywhere to share, discuss, and develop ideas, perspectives, and innovative solutions regarding learning, best practices, and lessons learned (Siemens, 2005). Social media networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, ResearchGate, Academia, Whatsapp, and Yammer are some of the available tools, which could support to create and develop your own formal or informal networks. Further, blogs, wikis, or discussion forums are good way to share personal reflections and to provide good and bad examples, which others can access and initiate an informal network. Finally, the content platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, or SlideShare etc., can provide access to different experts globally and to their rich content on specific topics. With covid pandemic, there is no need to explain the potential advantages the tools such as Teams and Zoom video conference can bring to collaborative teamwork and learning. All these technologies and their features could help collaborative learning in formulating informal networks and weak ties, exchanging ideas and perspectives, and co-creating relevant information and knowledge in an easy way. In long-term, these technologies can enable co-production of knowledge, learning communities and networks, and life-long learning. Of course, the never-ending list of these technologies and continuous update of new technologies can lead to ambiguity, information overload, or frustration as indicated by the study of Capdeferro & Romero (2012). So proper care should be taken in the selection of tools for learning networks.
References
Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i3.675.
Bittner, E. & Leimeister, J.M. (2014). Creating Shared Understanding in Heterogeneous Work Groups: Why It Matters and How to Achieve It. Journal of Management Information Systems 31(1):111-141
Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.
Chirumalla, K. (2013). Managing Knowledge for Product-Service System Innovation: The Role of Web 2.0 Technologies. Research-Technology Management Journal, March—April 2013, pp. 45-53.
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: Learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1).
1Kay Oddone, PLNs Theory and Practice, A video lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8mJX5n3IEg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqSBTr9DPH8
