[Working notes, with cloned or borrowed materials that still need to be organized]
Practice of the teacher
Loss of status
There is no distinction enforced in the software between teachers and students.
Requires a change of teacher's role (inefficient when there is some Resistance to Models of Collaboration)
This relation between learners and teachers may be asymmetric, and the roles may shift over time.
Students and teachers are co-learners and co-teachers.
Resistance to online teaching can come from both staff and students. Talbott (cited in Rudestam & Schoenholtz-Read, 2002) highlights the apprehension of lecturers who anticipate losing status and power. (Cut/paste from Debbie et al.)
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(Cut/paste from paper coweb) One Civil Engineering faculty member, upon hearing about our findings, responded, "But undergraduate students should have only single-answer problems! Design comes much later! " When posed the issue about ill- structured problems supporting collaboration better, he said that he didn't believe that collaboration was important. We have had similar responses from other faculty and teaching assistants with whom we've spoken. If undergraduate learning is about learning facts and skills, then where is the role for collaboration? If faculty are not supportive of collaboration, they may not convey to students what collaboration is about or how or why they should collaborate. Or even if the faculty are supportive, a traditional lecture-style class may not provide students with the models for what they are supposed to do in a collaborative learning situation. Engineering and Computer Science students told us in interviews that they didn't collaborate in the CoWeb because they simply didn't know what to do there. The students had no models for how to collaborate nor how to learn collaboratively (at least, with technology). |
This particular challenge bears resemblance to the one posed by constructivist teaching philosophy. To truly empower students within collaborative or coconstructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities. The instructor’s role shifts to that of establishing contexts or setting up problems to engage students. In a wiki, the instructor may set the stage or initiate interactions, but the medium works most effectively when students can assert meaningful autonomy over the process. It’s not that authority can’t be imposed on a wiki, but doing so undermines the effectiveness of the tool. It’s a safe bet that wiki-like writing spaces will be featured in future course management systems—along with other “social software” tools and protocols such as weblogs and RSS—but if practices don’t evolve, the effects on student learning will be superficial at best. Brian Lamb
Limited IT skills
Staff own IT skills, and logging on daily and contributing to the wiki and bulletin board were not natural daily activities.
Lack of training into how to teach using new technology
This has resonance with a study by Gerrard (2002) surveying the training of academic staff. The survey showed that 80% of the training was limited to how to use the technology, yet only 5% of academic staff had development or training into how to teach using new technology.
The early days of Basic and Logo showed that teachers are too time-constrained and lacking in technological training to build their own classroom technologies (Solomon, 1986). Research on facilitating adoption of collaborative practices suggests that teachers need a lot of help making the transition (Soloway, Krajcik, Blumenfeld, & Marx, 1996). Historical studies of higher-education teachers show that they are especially reticent to develop and apply innovations because the administrative and cultural barriers are so high (Cuban, 1999) Guzdial et al., 2001
Inadequate role models
With regard to teaching, the tutor role was crucial: by modelling tolerance towards differing styles tutors can affect the views of other participants.
Lack of time to explore new options
Cost-effective in terms of money, but not necessarily in terms of time. A context that encourages students take responsibility in their learning and knowledge building is not necessarily one that can cope with an idle teacher.
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(Cut/paste from paper coweb) Grudzial et al (paper coweb) surveyed all of the faculty about the Wiki/CoWeb (e.g., did they feel that they knew how to use the software? Was it easy enough to use?), about curriculum (e.g., did they have ideas for what they might use the CoWeb for?), and about their own practices. The common explanation was a lack of time to explore new options in their classes. They claimed to want to use collaborative learning in their classes, and they found the CoWeb to be easy enough to use. While it's also easy to simply blame the faculty, that's too simple an answer, too. The faculty are under harsh time constraints and a large list of curricular objectives to cover. Collaboration can seem like a distraction from simply telling the students what they need to learn. While finding that faculty are busy is certainly not new, it is notable that they did not find problems with usability or with ideas for learning activities. It's important to know where the problems are not in order to focus where the problems are. |
Recommendations
*The teacher should be prepared to play the role of leader. The role of the leader is to provide some centralized integration of decentralized development, resolve disputes between members, and help members find direction. The project leader serves more as coordinator and less as "boss". Team may be left free to choose their own leaders if they feel it is appropriate. *To be effective, collaborative learning requires a compromise between two extremes of control. At one extreme, learning is a transmission of knowledge from instructors to learners. At the other extreme, learners choose the topics that are interesting to them and teachers serve as facilitators. In a educational context, it is necessary students and instructors both yield some control to create a more dynamic environment. *Wiki use lead to a changed role of the teacher. Teachers will have to attain a new role as tutor or facilitator for students learning. *University staff should be prepared to be role models in this approach. *The teachers themselves were already innovators. They were open to try things, and they had some technological skill to fall back on. [Gruzdial et al., 2001] *By having teachers always active both during "informational" sessions and in creating projects of their own, we were providing them both with direct experiences of the benefits of active learning and tangible experiences of the intrinsic nature of active exploration. [Emergent pedagogy] *Teachers have a distinctive role to play in assuring that all idiosyncratic learners are supported. [Emergent pedagogy] *It is not that teachers are irrelevant, nor that emergent pedagogy makes teachers indistinguishable from students. Nor is it that a collaborative learning setting is a license for a lack of teacher preparation or inattention to other responsibilities of teaching. It is rather that the roles of teachers can be quite profitably re-imagined from the perspective of distributed organization. [Emergent Pedagogy] *The demands on the teacher may actually be greater in an emergent classroom than they are in a hierarchical one. Preparation requires anticipation of a wide range of possible directions. . [Emergent Pedagogy] *Most importantly, teachers in an emergent classroom are relieved of an uncomfortable burden: They cease to be the setters of standards by which students are judged, becoming instead role models for the kinds of inquiry in which they want their students themselves to be engaged. [Emergent Pedagogy] *In order to have teachers approach a role as facilitator instead of instructor, there is a need for professional development for teachers in service and a good preparation for pre-service teachers. [...]"
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