Collaborative Learning - The Take-Aways

One of the most challenging aspects of our company's recent integration was finding ways to transfer knowledge quickly and easily from subject matter experts and super users to new inquiring minds. Collaborative learning tools offer exciting possibilities to meet these needs. However, the primary barriers I face in a corporate environment is finding a tool that is secure enough for the highly confidential information we share within our business environment, yet simple and inexpensive enough for our IT police to allow it on our desktops. Any suggestions on such software would be greatly appreciated.

I think wikis would be extremely functional and easy for collaborating work groups, discussion groups, post-training Q&As, etc. Blogs would be great for ongoing "conversation" with executives on where we're going, updates, etc.

I have learned a lot from this collaborative learning class. It introduced me to quite a few tools I have been interested in getting more familiar with but hadn't taken the time to explore. And Tony's expertise was great in sorting them all out - helping me understand the best and appropriate uses for each, and kindly but firmly setting deadlines to ensure I kept up with exploring and using the new tools.

For future classes, I think it would be helpful to have prework that walked people through the tools one by one and allowed more time and more interaction with the tools before actually plowing into them in course assignments (especially for beginners).

On numerous occasions I found our collaboration tools essential as our team had challenges with time schedules and difficulties coming together. I also found that when we didn't have forced collaboration sessions, we sometimes broke away from the real benefits of the tools and simply created something quickly on our own, rather than leveraging the real benefit of discussion and knowledge-sharing. Perhaps "forced" collaboration sessions between assignment deadlines would encourage that interaction and help people develop more natural collaboration patterns.

Now, after completing this class, I see the benefit of collaborative learning and will look for ways of incorporating it into both instructor-led and online instruction. Thanks, Tony, for allowing me to be part of this class.

Collaborative Learning - Week Three Experiences

Week three of our Collaborative Learning class brought discovery of various add-ins. I was surprised at how easy they were to incorporate. There are many cool features I still want to explore as I have more time. I think the polling feature would be very useful, I also liked the site meter and the RSS feed buttons which I added to my site.

Once more I found our collaboration tools extremely helpful as we tried to keep our project moving with work schedule constraints and varied time zones. However, I found that in our collaborative environment, it was much easier to get busy and not participate as much as I would have when forced to face my facilitator or team members in an actual conference call or live meeting encounter. It became apparent that deadlines would need to be set and enforced in a corporate collaborative environment to ensure things kept progressing.

Collaborative Successes

Week two of our collaborative learning experience was definitely easier than week one. Yahoo 360 and My Web were very intuitive and easy to set up.

Our new collaboration tools were essential as our team had challenges with time schedules and difficulties coming together.

The biggest challenge it seems for all team members is time. I'd definitely like to devote more time to the projects at hand and keep getting stretched with work schedule challenges. Adding a few more weeks to the class schedule would have been helpful for me - it'd be great to have a little less to do and more time to do it in - especially the class project creation week. It'd be great to gain one more week for completion of the class project.

I'm looking forward to creating something fun with my team.

Social Networking in the Real Biz World

An attractive element of this collaboration training class for me was understanding and applying the benefits of knowledge sharing within our organization - especially as we're having to transfer knowledge quickly and easily during our recent integration with UnitedHealthcare. The problem I faced was finding a tool that was secure enough for the highly confidential information we share within our business environment and justifying the need for such a tool.

Michael Hickins' April 25, 2006, article, Social Networking Comes to the Enterprise, in Internet News, describes the importance of social networking in the business environment and recommends a valuable tool, BizWiki. It allows users to create and edit content without having to adhere to a rigid content management format. It also offers a great "Ask the Expert" function.

Watch for future posts on other similar tools and updates as I continue to research the best tools for the highly confidential "real biz world."

Screaming through the Fast Lane

Wow, what a week. I found this first week of discovery both fascinating and frustrating as I tried to veer into the fast lane to get sufficiently equipped to at least skim through our first assignments. I definitely could have spent much more than to 2 to 3 hours of work suggested, if I didn't already have my hands full with plenty of integration activities.

Suggestions for what could have been better? I would have liked to have started the week with more background and knowledge on blogs and wikkis - how to create one, how to post comments, link to other sites, etc, so my focus could have been on richer information sharing, rather than bumbling through the basic tasks.

Thanks for your patience with me, and I'm looking forward to learning so much more.

Brain Surgery Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

Since the time my son was two years old he was very vocal about wanting to be a brain surgeon. I don't know if he was spurred on by the excited reactions he'd get from people (including myself) or the fact that he could always win at the "Operation" game, but his aspirations died out after time.

I took solace in Tony Karrer's recent posting,
http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/04/best-jobs-in-america-time-to-call-your.html which actually ranks surgeons as the #30 best job compared to #13 techical writer and #18 curriculum developer. Maybe following in his Mom's footsteps wouldn't be so bad afterall.

Collaborative SWAT Teams

In forming our team for collaborative learning assessment and discoveries, it is important to join together teams of different skill sets, knowledge levels and company backgrounds. Perhaps a hybrid of various skills levels would most benefit the team - some with stronger writing/research skills, some with strong technical skills, some with stronger leadership skills, etc. Participation, social grounding, and active learning conversation skills are essentials for strong teamwork.

In Amy Soller's article on Supporting Social Interaction in an Intelligent Collaborative
Learning System, she states "students learning effectively in groups encourage each other to ask questions, explain and justify their opinions, articulate their reasoning, and elaborate and reflect upon their knowledge. The benefits of collaborative learning, however, are only achieved by active, wellfunctioning teams."

CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING TEAMS
Ideally, an intelligent collaborative learning system would be able to understand and interpret a group’s conversation, and could actively support the students during their learning activities. Monitoring, understanding, and facilitating collaborative learning activities begins with an understanding of the behaviors that characterize effective collaborative learning interaction.

In Barbara Gross Daivd's article in Collaborative Learning Group Work and Study Teams, she states that some instructors prefer to form the groups themselves taking into account students' period achievement, level of preparation, work habits, ethnicity, and gender (Connery, 1988). Other faculty, however, try to sprinkle the more able students evenly among the groups. A middle ground, proposed by Walvoord (1986) is to ask students to express a preference, if they wish, then make the assignments themselves.

I'm looking forward to becoming a part of a team that breaks new ground and discovers exciting new possibilities for knowledge sharing and collaborative learning.

eLearning Technology: Next Revolution in Interactions - Suggests Major Shift in Training

In Tony Karrer's recent posting, "eLearning Technology: Next Revolution in Interactions - Suggests Major Shift in Training," he makes the strong point that training will be marginalized unless we become more focused on supporting and enabling tacit work. For more information, see his blog:
eLearning Technology: Next Revolution in Interactions - Suggests Major Shift in Training

Collaborative Learning - The Beginning of Discovery

There’s nothing like a company integration to highlight the importance of bringing knowledge experts, super users and new inquiring minds together. No time for interviews with subject matter experts, instructional design, wordsmithing and dynamic online course development. We need to be up and running with resources today!

Thus my interest in collaborative learning and new effective ways to develop communities where knowledge can be shared, developed and evolved … and don’t forget we have to make it FAST and easy.

In the next few months I will be part of a collaboration team that will be looking at blogs, wikis, discussion groups, podcasts, and other collaborative learning design to better understand what works and doesn’t work in collaborative learning experiences.

With the expert guidance of our facilitator, Tony Karrer of TechEmpower, I invite you to follow along with our Collaborative Learning Team in our journey of discovery and knowledge building. Happy discovery!