collaboration and knowledge building

Monday's Mercury News had an interesting column by Larry Magid in the Business section. In the article (titled "Cheating is cheating, but tech offers chance to teach critical thinking" in the online version and "Technology could aid student learning" in the paper version), Magid argues that while students cheating on tests and papers is wrong, maybe what teachers should be doing is rethinking what they're evaluating and how they're evaluating it. As Magid points out:

In the work force, what's important in most situations is not so much the facts you can pull out of your head but your ability to acquire information when you need it and — most importantly — your ability to make sense of it.

Team papers and tests provide opportunities for students to work together on assignments and better understand the collaborative nature of knowledge development. Academe still tends to cling to the notion of the lone researcher toiling away in the laboratory during the wee hours of the morning. But consider the recent breakthroughs in science such as the human genome project and face transplant. These involve multiple groups coordinating their efforts to test theories, gather data, interpret results, and strike out on new scientific paths.

As Eisenberg et al. point out, teams are not without their drawbacks. Team members must have the expertise for the task, must have training in how to work together, must have a task that requires teamwork, and must figure out a way to match team member expertise with assigned work.

Certainly in the educational setting we need to do a better job of teaching students how to collaborate as they learn about and explore new topics. The notion that learning is an individual effort isolates students from each other. One reason I have students blog in my online classes and comment on each others' blogs is that students learn from each other. On my teaching evaluations, students often comment that reading others' blogs helps them better understand the class material and bring to their attention concepts and ideas they overlooked.

~ Professor Cyborg