When reflecting on the third topic of this course and choosing one of the suggested questions for the blog posts, I was in doubt whether I could find a real learning experience that included:   a) collaborative learning and b) something that moved my own thinking forward. The last part was the real challenge – how can we tell when we have moved our thinking forward?

The easiest example would be to quote collaborative learning experiences from this ONL course itself, since we have commented on our collaborative learning numerous times in our PBL group during the course. But I found that, being Swedish and growing up with group work in pre-school, group work (Swedish “grupparbeten“) in school years 1-9, group work in upper secondary school and finally more group work at the university in my language teacher training programme ), I should have many useful examples to choose from. My problem was only, to be honest, that in my experience group work was seldom a rewarding, innovative and empowering experience, the way it is described in i.e. the online webinar by Miriam Fischer, Gregor Theilmeier and Danielle Santos for this course.  As was stated in the initial dilemma of the course, collaborative learning can too often materialise as co-operative learning at its best and social loafing at its worst.