Week #10: Collaboration

The overarching question of this week's screen cast and readings was, "how can we effectively support collaboration among learners?"  As teamwork is becoming increasingly more popular, it is important to understand cooperative and collaborative learning. Especially, in the corporate context, because teams can take more time and resources to complete a task than an individual IDs should be well aware of the decision points and factors which may enhance or deter collaborative learning.   In my previous experience in working in teams, I've learned a lot more with more diverse teams than homogeneous teams.  However, I remember having a hard time coming to consensus quickly on many aspects of the projects.

There were two  question that popped into my head while reading and listening to the screen cast:

1. Is leadership considered an aspect of collaborative learning?  Are the individuals who have higher social skills considered a leader?
2. How do collaborative learning in different contexts differ?  Since one of the learning outcomes of collaboration is academic achievement, can collaborative learning be applicable in diverse contexts?

Lastly, our team will not use collaborative learning in our project, because the learning outcomes of collaboration does not align with our project's learning outcomes.

MC

Weel #9: Reflection

As the time is ticking and our team is struggling to move on with our project, we made a big decision to limit the scope of our project from career development to networking.  The overarching goal of our project is to teach learners how to network in structured and unstructured settings.  Our audience remains the same: IST master's students.  Thankfully, we are able to use some information we've gathered the last couple of weeks for our original project.
Now that we have more direct learning goals, it will be easier for us to have our learners reflect upon the learning material.  For instance, we will have questions  at the end of each module to aide the learner to reflect upon what was learned in each module.  The questions will be mostly situational, due to the nature of our subject.  One question I had while watching this week's screen cast: Are some approaches/ techniques of reflection more  appropriate for certain learner characteristics, such as age?

MC