e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Collaborative Intelligence (Admin Update 7)
Collaborative Intelligence—where, for instance, peers offer structured feedback to each other, available knowledge resources are diverse and open, and the contributions of peers and sources to knowledge formation are documented and transparent. This builds soft skills of collaboration and negotiation necessary for complex, diverse world. It focuses on learning as social activity rather than learning as individual memory.
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Video 5a: Social Learning
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Video 5b: Collaborative Learning Dynamics
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Video 5c: Extrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
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Video 5d: Success and Failure in Performance Based Assessments
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Collaborative Intelligence in Scholar
All Levels of Participation: Make a comment below this update about the ways in which educational technologies can support collaborative intelligence. Respond to others' comments with @name.
Additional Introductory and Advanced Participation: Make an update introducing a collaborative intelligence concept on the community page (not your personal page - because only peers will see that!). Define the concept and provide at least one example of the concept in practice. Be sure to add links or other references, and images or other media to illustrate your point. If possible, select a concept that nobody has addressed yet so we get a well-balanced view of collaborative intelligence. Also, comment on at least three or four updates by other participants. Collaborative intelligence concepts might include:
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Distributed intelligence
- Crowdsourcing
- Collective intelligence
- Situated cognition
- Peer-to-peer learning
- Communities of practice
- Socratic dialogue
- Community and collaboration tools
- Wikis
- Blogs
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Suggest a concept in need of definition!
I feel that the concept of collaborative intelligence in learning can be confusing if the learning goals and modalities of learning are not well defined.
On the goals, first, collaborative learning (or learning through collaborative intelligence) is obviously the method of choice to learn how to collaborate. The set of soft skills it implies are important to take part in real world complex processes. Whether such complexity is always necessary or desirable would be worth discussing, but it is often just a matter of fact and we need to get trained for it.
An alternate goal may be to learn hard skills. Expertise in such skills is obviously invaluable to teach them and modalities of collaborative intelligence may vary in their aptitude to benefit from expertise. Learning between peers with the same degree of knowledge may be a slow process, unless external expertise (e.g. from books, the internet) feeds into it. Facilitated peer-learning may be more satisfactory, as it may reduce the cost of searching for relevant information. The facilitator may be a teacher or a ranking system (e.g. Google, Stackoverflow), where content curation itself is crowdsourced. Significantly, ranking systems bring asymmetry among peers by allowing to distinguish between experts and non-experts, i.e. those in a position to teach and those primarily learning.
It is worth noting that the same person can be expert and non-expert (teacher and learner). This can occur simultaneously, for instance when peers have complementary skills and expertise relevant to what is being learned. It can also happen sequentially, when a learner turns into a teacher after gaining expertise. In both cases, initial learning is strongly reinforced by the act of teaching. An important element in the design of learning environments should be, therefore, to facilitate the transition between non-expert and expert role, rather than assuming that everyone has the same degree of expertise.
Overall, I think that collaborative learning environments should acknowledge the heterogeneity of expertise and use it to facilitate the learning process. Key elements are the ability to identify expertise and to update this identification once someone has gained new expertise.
Just like @Soraya Garcia-Sanchez, I have been trying to work with the concept of collaborative learning with English learners and I have recently been involved in using some online spaces to provide students with a chance to experience collaborative learning. From this experience I have noticed that collaborative intelligence is being built through constant feedback and interaction among peers. In other words, students feel a lot more motivated to participate and they do so collaboratively, having the chance to not only change their points of view but also make others reconsider their concepts. Students also reported on their feelings using technologies to build up knowledge, saying that they feel much more comfortable by having the chance to think about what they want to say before writing, different from the classroom in which they just say things instantenously.
Assessing feedback interactions in a collaborative learning scenario
I'd also like to open a discussion on the concept of assessing feedback interactions among learners. This is an important concept, which has to do with continuous assessment. Collaborative learning environments allow participants to share and contribute in each other's work to finally produce the work or task set. While assessing the interactions, we are observing students' participation and engagement in the production of their work, and at the same time, we are assessing a great number of competences that have to do with creativity, autonomy and collaboration, of course.
In the case of EFL, collaborative learning using digital tools work really well when using blogs, forums or wikis. I have seen how some shy in-class participants become quite active when using e-tools in a collaborative learnig scenario. This environment also allows teachers to track students' performace of competences and their learning process.
Collaborative learning + Assessing Feedback Interations
I have been experimenting with collaborative learning in EFL learning environments and I can see that my students can perform a variety of learning and language competences better. In general terms, these learners have always favoured these collaborative learning environments because they can share and see what others are doing (I have used questionnaires to get some feedback from them on this collaborative learning dynamics). So, yes, they are learning from each other. The lectures this week are truly outstanding, and I especially like the idea of assessing not only the final product but also the feedback interactions between the community members. This somehow goes back to that previous concept of socratic dialogue, also mentioned in this MOOC. It is about having conversations and constructing knowledge between learners who are creating a unique piece of work. and all this happens in a continuous process of learning in which students are perfoming different competences that contribute to achieve the course goals.
Regarding Belén and David's comments on intrinsic motivation, I have to share with you that it is hard to just focus on this one when staring a course because learners (I mean, adults) are also practical citizens who want to achieve a mark and carry on with their professional lives. Having said that, I believe that collaborative learning environments can greatly enhance the intrinsic motivation in participants, because they depend on each other, or as Dr Cope and Dr Kalantzis suggested, collaborative learners are dealing with reciprocity and that implies being social and being part of a community for learning.
Thanks and enjoy your day/night!
Collaborative intelligence concepts: Socratic dialogue
I came across a nice description of Socratic dialogue by Kingsley (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1959405) that describes the Socratic method as the use of questioning by the moderator to promote inquiry by students. According to Kingsley, asynchronous online discussion forums allow more than one person to contribute simultaneously, allow shy students the opportunity to contribute without pressure and provide a written record of easily accessible evidence.
Wenning et al.(2006) provide a helpful list of questions that can be used by the moderator (tutor) to promote Socratic dialogue. Examples of such questions include interpretive questions (what do you mean by this?), Explanatory questions (What is the reason for that), Verification questions (What are the facts to support it?) etc. For more details you can refer to the paper directly here: http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/pte/publications/engaging_students.pdf