SISLT CSCL

A well constructed group will also be greater than the sum of it's parts - it will be able to grapple with a cognitive situation that may exceed the experience and comfort levels of the individual members of the group.

In addition, every act taken in support of assimilating new input helps to reinforce retention. This is why it can be so beneficial to take notes by hand while reading new material or to read aloud - each new contact with the material creates a new and different mental link. Being able to associate knowledge transfers in a group environment, "ah, yes, I remember this because his argument was that x was the cause of y" provide yet another mental connection to the new knowledge.

Critique of point 1:

We agreed with you that free-riding, the sucker-effect, and social loafing, a situation where some group members do not engage optimally in the task because they believe someone else in the group will pick up the slack, may exist in some collaborative learning. In fact, there are some cases where some group members feel reluctant to engage in social interactions during group work, and they often use delay tactics in responding to the group work so that the other group members can get the work done. However, these are not necessarily applicable to most collaborative learning. On the contrary, collaborative and cooperative learning foster social support and increase individual motivation and engagement. For example, students in cooperative groups help each other, encouraging engagement in the learning activity.

Critique of point 2:

Well, we will like to point out that the issues of ‘whether the instructor and student are trained or not’ and ‘whether the right resources were selected or not’ are not specific to collaborative and cooperative learning. These can definitely affect students regardless of whether they learning in a group or individually. On the other hand, I think collaborative can help resolve these issues in the sense that in collaborative learning, collective knowledge occurs when students learn together or work together in a group; they complement one another’s knowledge, so that different members of the group may contribute different components of the solution.

Critique of point 3:

Although frustration may occur when collaborating with people they do not know well or when other group member do not engage in the activity, one of the goal of collaborative learning is to foster knowledge and mutual act of working together among group members. Collective knowledge occurs when students learn together or work together in a group. For example, one individual in the group with unique knowledge could explain to the others a strategy or solution, and this explanation could benefit both those who receive it as well as the one who generates it. Also, working cooperatively with peers and valuing cooperation result in greater psychological health than working independently. More specifically, cooperativeness is positively related to emotional maturity, well-adjusted social relations, strong personal identity, ability to cope with adversity, social competencies, basic trust and optimism about people, self-confidence, independence and autonomy, higher self-esteem, and increased perspective taking skills

Critique of Point 4

It is argued that collaborative success is not a given in a CSCL environment and is therefore an incidental byproduct of the process, not an integral part. But scholars – from Vygotsky in 1978 through to modern researchers such as Kreijns and Kirschner - reiterate the same point: the key element in CSCL learning is social interaction. (Kreijns, Kirschner, Vermuelen, 2013) That it has not always been done successfully does not negate the fact that it needs to be done successfully.

Critique of Point 5

Similarly, an argument that too many practitioners misuse or do not understand the tools available does not mean that the edifice those tools were designed to build is unnecessary – it means that the tools need to be refined. In their conclusion, Marsick and Volpe state that two components that make the efficacy of CSCL cloudy include the difficulty of transferring and negotiating knowledge – passing on knowledge in a community of practice – and incorporating the impact of distributed working relationships and cultural differences. We submit that these cloudy areas are exactly the areas that an emphasis on effective community building will bring into focus.

Conclusion

It has been said that a collaborative heavy CSCL is not an absolute transfer of knowledge. We agree, inasmuch as there is never an absolute transfer of knowledge. According to the constructivist school of education we as learners generate knowledge and meaning through the interaction of experience and ideas we bring to the subject matter. We assimilate new concepts and points of view and arrive at a modified understanding of the material. The more points of view, the more raw computational mass we have to work with and the better our final understanding.

Module 2 - Team 3 Position

Although CSCL is fundamentally different from other domains of study in the learning sciences, it takes collaborative and cooperative learning, that is, learning and interactions that take place among students when they work together in a small group that promote social learning. Therefore, we are of the position that learning in collaboration is better than learning alone and that it broadly involves active engagement and interaction among group members to achieve a common goal. Our arguments are supported by the following points.

First, group members can use their collective knowledge about a problem-solving task or domain to cue each other’s prior knowledge when trying to think of ideas, strategies, and solutions. Although, this depends on collaborators having some shared (i.e., common) knowledge to increase the likelihood of retrieving the most relevant knowledge for the problem or task.

Secondly, collective knowledge occurs when students learn together or work together in a group; they complement one another’s knowledge, so that different members of the group may contribute different components of the solution. For example, one individual in the group with unique knowledge could explain to the others a strategy or solution, and this explanation could benefit both those who receive it as well as the one who generates it. And since explaining or demonstrating a task or skill is in a different cognitive domain within Bloom’s Taxonomy than information recall there are benefits to all members of the group – including the original knowledge provider.

Thirdly, collaboration can also increase memory and problem-solving resources through each individual’s contribution to the recall of the relevant problem features and possible strategies. This is in line with both the cognitive load model and the ZPF model. Consequently, the group has more cognitive resources to spend thinking through possible solutions and correcting errors.

Also, collaborative learning can increase individual motivation and engagement. For example, students in cooperative groups help each other, encouraging engagement in the learning activity. The act of establishing what information is shared by all collaborators contributes to the construction of common ground, while the exchange of multiple perspectives of shared information provides for the opportunity to reexamine and reevaluate stored perceptions and acquire points of view that they might not have considered if working alone.

In addition, in line with small group cognition theory, when small groups engage in cooperative problem solving or collaborative knowledge building, there are distinctive processes of interest at the individual, small-group and community levels of analysis, which interact strongly with each other.

Furthermore, collaborative and cooperative learning promote positive relationships and social support in agreement with social judgment theory, which states that social judgments individuals make about each other result in either a process of acceptance, resulting in mutual liking and respect, or a process of rejection, resulting in mutual dislike and lack of respect. Cooperative experiences promoted greater task-oriented and personal social support than learning alone.

Lastly, working cooperatively with peers and valuing cooperation result in greater psychological health than working independently. Cooperative attitudes were highly correlated with a wide variety of indices of psychological health. More specifically, cooperativeness is positively related to emotional maturity, well-adjusted social relations, strong personal identity, ability to cope with adversity, social competencies, basic trust and optimism about people, self-confidence, independence and autonomy, higher self-esteem, and increased perspective taking skills.

For these reasons we assert that the construction of an effective social environment to enhance collaborative learning is not just an incidental benefit but an essential part of any successful distance education solution.