A Galton board demonstrates how the normal distribution emerges as a collective property: each ball makes a series of independent, purely binary left-or-right decisions at every peg, yet the cumulative summation of thousands of these simple binomial outcomes spontaneously produces the deterministic bell curve at the bottom.
We are here to learn about “Open Networked Learning”. And yet, if I look honestly at what PBL Group 5 actually produced for Topic 3, I see something uncomfortably familiar: eight individuals, each doing their own research, each answering their own question, each writing their own section… and then placing it, side by side, on a shared webpage.
We cooperated. We did not collaborate.
This is not a criticism. It is a confession, and I think it might bring some insight to look deeper into it. Because we are students of open networked learning, studying the very phenomenon we failed to enact. The quote from the scenario that keeps returning to me is this one: “So often when we ask students to collaborate, they see it as merely a way of distributing the workload, and not as an opportunity to build and consolidate their collaborative skills.” We knew this before we began. We discussed it. And we still did it.
Why? I think there are at least three honest reasons.
The first is time. We each came to this course with full professional lives. Todd exploring reflection in community learning, Nahid untangling the prepositions of learning with, as, from, Grigor tracing how children imitate parents, myself asking whether learning is even possible without language, Nahor worrying (rightly) about the time cost of all this in higher education, Lai analysing short videos for young students to learn, Alexandra mapping Senge’s disciplines onto group work, Mark reaching for the concept of interthinking itself. These are rich, genuinely interesting questions. But we never wove them. We did not have the time, or the shared container, to sit with each other’s ideas long enough for something new to emerge from the contact between them.
The second is the tools. A Google Site is a good place to place content side by side. It is a poor place to think together. Our discussions appear as comments below individual sections, polite and appreciative, but not genuinely disruptive of each other’s thinking. Nobody’s question changed how someone else answered theirs. That is the test (I think): genuine collaboration leaves traces in the work itself: A question from one person reshaping another person’s argument, a concept from one section quietly appearing, transformed, in another. I do not see many of those traces in our work.
The third, and perhaps the most uncomfortable, is the role of generative AI. Several of us used it (including me). The texts it produced are long, thorough, well-referenced, and somehow “detached”. They answer the question posed but carry no fingerprints of actual encounter with another person. Interthinking requires the friction of another mind. A large language model removes that friction. It gives you a finished thought rather than a provocation. And the content moves through us instead of sitting with us and changingourselves. It is too quick, too long, too much… Even individual learning takes time. And so the texts we each produced, however individually valuable, could not easily become the raw material for a shared one.
But what would genuine collaboration have looked like? I think it would have meant starting with a single question none of us could answer alone, and staying with the discomfort of that together long enough to produce something that surprised us. Nahid’s distinction between learning with, as, and from a community could have been the spine of a shared piece. Mark’s interthinking could have been the lens. My question: Is learning possible without language?, could have unsettled Grigor’s account of infant imitation. Todd’s uncertainty about how to assess community learning could have found a partial answer in Alexandra’s Senge framework, which could in turn have been tested against Nahor’s worry about time. There was a shared essay here, waiting between the lines. Howver, we did not write it.
This is not failure. It is data. And data is information. The very difficulty we experienced (the pull toward individual production, the absence of a guiding narrative, the verbosity that replaced genuine dialogue) is exactly what the question at the heart of Topic 3 is asking us to understand. How do we design for genuine collaborative learning, not just the appearance of it?
I do not have a clean answer. But I think the beginning of one is this: Collaboration requires a shared stake in something that cannot be completed alone. Not a divided task, but an undivided one. Our questions in this topic were each answerable individually. Next time, I would want to start with a question that genuinely isn’t.