… where we did everything but work collaboratively.
This is end of topic 3 in the ONL221 course, and it was hard. Let me start from the beginning…
Topic 3 was focused on Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning. As its name implies, this was about our experience working in teams or having our students working in teams. We had agreed with my group that the first week would be to discuss the topic and get our insights on the different branches of it and our experiences, and the second week would be focused on creating the outcome to share with the rest of the community.
As this was our 6th week working together and as part of a ‘team’, so I had expected that the goals would be easy to achieve. Moreover, this particular topic was something that we could all relate to. What I didn’t consider (as moderator for this topic) was that my colleagues would simply not engage. They didn’t attended to the meetings or even collaborate offline. This is a clear example of how some of my students feel when they are working online, so how could we work collaboratively?
According to Harold-Jarche, the network learning looks like the model below.

So it can be said that team work is goal oriented and collaborative, while social networks are opportunity driven. Therefore, the first step for team work is to have a clear goal. That sounds easy, but it is not enough.
So what other tools can we use? Some of the tools that we could use are presented on https://www.wgu.edu/blog/connectivism-learning-theory2105.html#close
Maybe it was too late to use them for our team work in Topic 4, but it might be good to keep it mind for the next experience.
The last question is – now that I have felt the pain of when team work doesn’t goes well – how can I transfer my team work experience and skills to my students? Can I help them to avoid going through the same pain?
I still don’t have an answer to this, but I will update this blog as soon as I have it (if ever).