During the last few weeks, I created some concepts about collaboration in order to explore the possibilities, which I would like to share.
Musical progress and Task based spaces
These first two concepts came about from the iFontys session. The students there had a couple of great ideas, which resulted in two storyboards. You can click the images to get the entire storyboard .
These two concepts fit rather well in the group collaboration idea, which I talked about earlier. However, when I discovered that there was also such a thing as spontaneous collaboration, I wondered how I could use that.
Forward reward system
In spontaneous collaboration it is more important to make it attractive and fun to collaborate than to make collaboration more efficient. So when are people looking for spontaneous collaboration? Primarily when they have a question. However, asking help is often seen as an admittance of failure. Likewise, helping someone might seem as if they’re only profiting from your hard work.
Thus, you need to create the awareness that collaboration on any level is okay. Asking questions helps, since it means you’ve exhausted all your other options. And often the task of phrasing a question correctly makes you come up with the answer yourself!
As for helping others, when you explain things, you reorder your own cognitive model to make someone else understand. The result; you become more intimately acquainted with the material and can use it even better in the future!
So I wanted a concept that would reward the students for any collaborative task.
The concept relies heavily on getting a nice sense of collaboration. Since getting points helps both you and your group/class, you get the feeling that collaboration is a good thing.
This concept does require some form of moderation, since everyone and their uncle could potentially abuse this. But this may be a very interesting role of the teacher of the students, allowing him to participate in the process as well.
There, a couple of concepts that have been floating around in my head. They’re not complete concepts yet, but I’m getting there!
A Pad Full Of Noodles 