In reviewing my portfolio this week, I’ve decided that I’m actually not that great at collaborating. I think I’m too easily impatient and/or too social when I’m working with others. I find it hard to get the right balance and so my tendency is to feel that I don’t get a lot done when I collaborate, at least in the style of what I think optimal collaboration ought to be. My preference is usually to share ideas, plan what needs to be done and then divide the work up to do. I’m not very good at writing with others or actually doing the work right along side others. I wonder if anybody is? I find it hard to balance being nice with getting my own thoughts or opinions across, having my voice heard. I tend to give too much to being nice, or if I don’t I often end up feeling as though I was too pushy. I think this is something that I really need to work on developing more.
With my increased interest in learning to use blogging to collaborate this will be an interesting undertaking to see what, if any difference this technology as a tool can make to my ability to collaborate. The challenge will be, can I find ways to get better at collaborating by making better use of the technology? Will blogging help me? Will commenting on other blogs lead to better collaboration? Or, are these completely separate things? I wonder what others think about this. If you’re reading this perhaps you’d comment on your own ability to collaborate effectively with others and what difference technology is making for you? Does blogging help? What can I learn from you about how to be better at collaborating?
The ability to collaborate is an assumption we make. The trouble is we each have a different view on what collaboration means. It’s very important to lay down very specific guidelines before you start to collaborate so everyone knows what’s expected and how collaborate. I’ve been caught out badly myself collaborating on a wiki with work colleagues where how I worked and they worked just didn’t work. Also seen it happen when creating a collaborative presentation online where there were 6 participants — what you had was individuals not collaboration.
Blogging works differently in the sense of ownership. As a blogger you have ownership of your blog hence reason for using it. Your community chooses to either engage with you or not. How you build your community, structure your posts and engage back with your readers will influence the level of collaboration.
Sue, thanks for your comment.
It’s true that blogging works differently and I’m only just beginning to understand the power of that. I’ve worked more offen with collaboration on wikis and yes the sense of ownership is so different. Similarly with google docs. Both styles have advantages I think depending on the task.
Primarily my work is in the field of education and so I’m always interested in how this technology can transfer into classrooms with students. I’m curious what will work in that environment to help student collaborate. I’ve tended recently to focus on wikis, but this comment challenge is making me rethink that. This week I’m going to move more into encouraging my students to try out blogging. As the teacher I need to better understand how to track those (I’ve only just this moment clued into the cocomment tools at the bottom of this comment page!) and how to use tags to collect the blog postings together. In the past, because I’ve had only one or two students who chose to blog I’ve been able to have their blog posts collected into my netvibes account. I like the idea though of having them collated into one “roll”. I’ll be working on trying to understand how to do that over the next week. Any advice will be appreciated.
Betty
I found your post on Collaboration to be thought-provoking. I know that I was surprised when I went through my online teaching training, just how much of an emphasis there was on collaborative efforts.
Since my background is in medicine I fear this may have influences my abilities to collaborate well. My undergraduate years were spent in premedical courses (notorious for non-collaborative efforts) then my medical school years were spent with those who’d been typical premeds and did not collaborate well with others, for fear of competition. The “every man/woman for him or herself” attitude in medicine undoubtedly contributes to the difficulties in collaborating.
I had a lot of difficulties in my online teaching training with the collaborative efforts, mainly because it was too easy for those who weren’t willing to work on group projects to ride along on the coattails of those who were and get a decent grade without doing much. I haven’t incorporated many collaborative efforts into my teaching because I am still trying to find a way to have efforts equitably distributed or be able to account for each person’s contribution. I did end up developing a way of capturing everyone’s contribution on a group project using a form to create a composite group paper.
I’m too new to educational blogging to know if blogging helps improve collaboration. With the challenge I am noticing it helps improve interaction and collegiality.
Totally agree you use different tools for different solutions.
Many teachers set up student blogs so that they can’t be found be search engines to limit risks. So I would suggest in your case you set up Google Reader and subscribe to all their blogs that way – then all posts will come into your Google Reader. Most teachers also moderate all comments so the comments have to be approved by the teacher before they are posted.
If you check the Getting Started with Edublogs page there are links to information on using blogs with students.
Thanks for the comments both of you. Drdyer, I tried going back your blog and the link wouldn’t work. Not sure why. It shows up as http://drdyer.edublog.edu but that didn’t get me there. I’d love to check out your blog as well.
Interesting thoughts on collaboration. It seems to me that we blur collaboration a little when we start to get into assessment. Our concerns are about who did what partially because of our need to assign grades. I know when I’ve taught in public schools that is often a criticism that students have about project work. “So and so didn’t carry their weight and so it isn’t fair that we’re being marked the same.”
Teachers struggle with ways of having students self assess their group participation to devise ways of assigning fair marks. It is a problem for students who are less able and not able to keep up with the group or contribute equally but it is also a problem for very motivated or very able students who often get ostracized for doing too much. Of course scaling grades, as our schools are wont to do, doesn’t help with this at all.
Personally I think that to really make collaboration work we have to move to a very different model of thinking about grading. We need to begin to honestly believe that our job is to make everyone succeed, not to rank how well they did at specific learning tasks. We need to make the learning relevant and authentic so that students are doing the work because the work is what they learn from and they want/need to know what they are being taught. Then we begin to be freed up a bit from having to worry about what they’re getting away with. And finally, I think we have to start to think about the difference between individual learning and collective learning. This is an area of thought I’m only on the fringes of but a community really does know more. This is a good thing that as we learn to acknowledge and accept, starts to have huge implications for looking at collaboration as the real tool, not just a step in getting everyone in the group to be able to know and do all the same things. With all the technology and access to information, with students who look at information as raw material rather than product, perhaps we should be focusing more on what we can learn as a group rather than what we each learn as individuals.
Sue, thanks for the tip. I’m going to investigate that. I’ll keep you posted as to how it works out.
Betty
It helps if I get the url correct. For some reason I keep leaving out the “s” in edublog”s” When I checked just now the server was down. 🙁
I know that the trends are shifting in how students are evaluated these days compared to how I was evaluated in school, however I still think there is something to be said about having people be accountable for their work.
If students are accountable for an equal amount of work on a project, this lackadaisical attitude may continue on with them in a work setting where one continues to see adults in the workplace trying to find ways of getting someone else to do their work so they can get out of doing all the work.
I will probably continue to wrestle with the old school vs. new school way of grading.
I’m still working on posting follow up thoughts on my blog take a peak at the http://drdyer.edublogs.org/
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Betty
Thanks for leaving comments. I finally got my thoughts up on collaboration.
I think that wikis may be the key in being able to get a project done and still being able to monitor who has contributed what to the project, so participants don’t feel slighted or that they are carrying anyone else.
Thanks for directing me to your post. I am really loving the kinds of connections that are being created through this comment challenge.
The tip about using Google documents is a good one. I’ve used it a bit myself for collaborative professional efforts.
I’ll keep this in mind for online group projects.