Concepts so far…

During the last few weeks, I created some concepts about collaboration in order to explore the possibilities, which I would like to share.

Difference between spontaneous and group collaboration

While I was working on some ideas that I had as a result of my Fontys session, I came to a conclusion. All my currently new ideas were based around the idea of collaboration within project groups. While not a bad thing, I got back to thinking about my original goal, which was to use tablets as a means towards improving education through collaboration.

Blackboard and groups… crap?

One thing that always seems illogical to me is the collaboration and group functionality on Blackboard, a virtual learning environment (VLE). Every course in Blackboard comes with its own discussion forum, where students and teachers enrolled in that course can ask questions, give answers and discuss the lesson material. Blackboard also gives teachers the possibility of creating groups of students within a course. Each group gets his own group page with some functionality already embedded; ‘File Exchange’, ‘Group Discussion Board’, ‘Send Email’.

So far, so good, right? Blackboard, which is one of the market leaders in VLE’s worldwide offers collaboration possibilities.

Effectiveness of Cooperative Learning

One of the main assumptions in my project is that cooperative learning improves learning as a whole. However, I had yet to find research that actually supported that assumption. Thanks to one of my acquaintances, Fanny, I managed to get my hands on a couple of good papers.

The best result I got from this is a good research question:

How can cooperative learning on tablets encourage students to ask and give help to others?

Some fast concepts for collaboration

I made some scenario’s about two quick concepts that I came up with for collaboration on tablets. They both follow these assumptions:

• Students read their textbooks or make their assignments on their tablet.
• Every students that is following a current course is connected through the system.

Read along for my two concepts: proximity collaboration and note collaboration.