The possibilities to use different technological solutions for online collaboration are endless. New tools pop up every week. I am currently involved in different communities where they use Teams, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Box, common hard drive, BlackBoard and more. It is confusing and time-consuming to know where information is placed depending on which project I am want to look into. I have to first remember which platform is used for that specific project and then find the information I was looking for. What do I want to say with this? Well, working in communities are somewhat exhausting.

It not only exhausting to be part of the collaborative learning community/network, it is also exhausting to facilitate. I had a class of 150 students the other day. Trying to make it more interactive and fun I had prepared a Miro-board so that we all could add information and edit. Well, that didn’t work out at all. With such a large group of students it was uncontrollable. Some students deleted text, others added irrelevant text, and other started to draw on our common board. What a great learning opportunity for me. Preparation is everything.

One thing that I came to think of connected to this course was that I don’t think the group that I facilitated felt like a community, or even a network. They were divided in subgroups in order to come up with a shared goal, but they didn’t even have a personal goal yet being first year students. The students were from different disciplines and with that said, I suspect their academic identity wasn’t established. With limited identity in conjunction with being put into a group of people with the same feeling of being lost in the academic world, made it difficult to collaborate and keep focus.

Topic 3 – Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning