Thursday, October 13, 2011

Module 3 Blog

Collaboration: Module 3 Blog Post

Howard Rheingold (2008), discusses that collaboration and communication is key to our world and to be successful. However, most cases people do not collaborate or communicate and the task at hand fails or is not as successful. Rheingold (2008) discusses the prisoners dilemma, the prisoners dilemma is that if two prisoners agree they would both get off without serving time but if they do not agree they both have to serve the time, and they never can agree! I could not agree with Rheingold more the human race has the hardest time collaborating and agreeing on things but when they do they get the best results. An example that he used is when the Egyptians built the pyramids, they had to have used collaboration and communication in order for them to be built successfully. Obviously, they were able to collaborate successfully because these amazing structures still stand today.

I believe that humans do not have a basic instinct to interact and work as a group. We were designed to fend for ourselves and our family and to compete until we have the best. However, we need to change this instinct and learn to adapt and be collaborative in everything that we do. With collaboration and communication we can succeed so much more in life!!

Technology can facilitate collaboration among learners more easily in my opinion than being face to face with each other. With the use of technology there is no longer the sense of competition and trying to be better than your peers. Blogs and discussion posts are the perfect example of this, we state our opinions and our peers elaborate on it or state why they feel differently and both classmates come to a common agreement most of the time. 

A study that I found that supported collaboration as an effective tool for learning is, "Collaborative versus individual use of regulative software scaffolds during scientific inquiry learning." This study compares individual and collaborative success during a scientific inquiry learning process. Forty two high school students either worked individually or in pairs, and the ones that worked in pairs showed significantly higher scores than the students that worked individually. This study can be found at http://web.ebscohost.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=2982653c-fb6c-46ff-9f68-cb28f8284471%40sessionmgr15&vid=5&hid=8


References


Rheingold, H. (2008, February). Howard Rheingold on collaboration [Video file].  Retrieved from  
Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. Amanda DarlingtonOctober 14, 2011 at 4:42 PM

    Rachel,

    I am glad that you decided to take a differing opinion...maybe we aren't born with the innate ability to get along as humans, but I also don't think that we are meant to live it in isolation either.

    In your post you stated that a lack of effective collaboration or communication reflects a failed product at times. I couldn't agree more. Every Friday my students are given a task to complete as a team building activity. One of my students said it brilliantly today when he said "we were all communicating, that wasn't the problem...it was what we were communicating that didn't work!" Sometimes it is great to get the perspective of a 6th grader! Great job!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Linda HutchisonOctober 15, 2011 at 7:28 AM

    Rachel
    In Rheingolds (2008) video, I really enjoyed the analogy of the “prisoners’ dilemma.” It was interesting, and I completely understood the concept of cooperation in this scenario. I agree with you that cooperation and collaboration is not genetic. I believe it is learned. Different situations make that obvious.

    I personally work better alone, not because I believe that no one can do my job the way I do, but because I have experienced the let-down when I expected things done by others and it didn’t happen. I also grew up without a father. He died when I was 12, so my mom counted on me to do things for her. I had to learn fast and depend on myself. I feel that each of use work the way our experiences have taught us.

    Cheers
    Linda H

    ReplyDelete
  3. sarahdwaldenuOctober 17, 2011 at 9:08 AM

    Rachel,

    While we have opposing opinions as to how humans' basic instincts operate, I do appreciate your position. In my experiences with collaborative efforts, I have met some humans whose divisive tactics and underhanded methods threaten to derail our projects. In a particular instances, a team member who outranked me tried to revamp the project so that his team only would receive the performance bonus for the completed project. However, my upper management team used these distractions as a teaching moment, which helped me to develop additional collaborative performance strategies that kept the collaboration efforts moving forward.

    I enjoyed reading your post, thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)