When I reflect on my communities and the impact of them in my professional development and learning in general, I realize that I do not follow a lot of people (I am not really active) on social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. However, by doing so I never thought I was lacking the communities they offered. This is mainly due to the fact that I see collaborative learning as beyond connecting with many many people, and whom you do not necessarily get to know. As Kay Oddone put it in the webinar (2022), I am more interested in the interaction that occurs in communities, and the knowledge produced through interaction and cycling of different ideas and insights. I can list a number of communities I belong in which engagement and presence are very much intertwined. Those communities (inside and outside academia) allow me to get new perspectives on the world, shaped by a repertoire of different experiences, cognitive abilities, knowledge, aspirations and much more. The knowledge formed in such communities is in a sense inalienable by other factors and is unique to people engaged in creating it.
Consequently, trust is an essential enabler to this, as we also discussed on PBL group 10. It is necessary that we as learners strive towards the same goal of fostering individual knowledge via collaborative learning. However, there are many other dimensions of collaborative learning, which are core to improve collaborative engagement and culture.
I strongly believe that participating in different learning groups has unconsciously shaped my identity both as a learner and teacher, because sharing what I knew, perceived or lacked, was somehow sharing who I was as a person, a participant in society, in the first place. One parallelization to this would be Etienne Wenger’s view of meaningful learning as a dynamic interplay of participation and what he calls reification (2010):
On the other side, seeing it from a teacher perspective, I strongly believe the pedagogical benefits of collaborative learning in terms of development of critical thinking skills and reflection (Brindley, Blaschke and Walti, 2009 ), but I need help and guidance with how to adequately convey this to my students and establish a sense of community within them. Being into computer networks; I myself know the importance of every single node in the network, which is represented by each individual in a learning community. Over the years, I have understood the importance of belonging to a community and the role it plays in deciding collaboratively to embrace a new, individual insight or perspective. However, that is a challenge I need to work on as a teacher, taking into account that there are other aspects that can be in conflict, such as individual commitment, values, abilities to name just a few.
In that direction, we have had some great ideas and tips in our PBL group discussions so far and I already feel motivated to help my students understand the benefits and opportunities of learning in groups.
Sources:
Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London.
Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).
Oddone Kay Webinar (19th of April 2022)
Alastair Creelman May 1, 2022
The boundaries between networks and communities are generally rather blurred and people in the periphery of your network can quickly become trusted colleagues. I have often gained new close colleagues through chance meetings on social networks . The various bubbles of networks and communities are always changing form as you change focus in your career.
islem megdiche May 29, 2022
Social media especially the more professional ones such as LinkedIn are great way to widen our network. I personally rely extensively on it my work.