Collaborative problem solving is fun and engaging to many students. The amount of research that proves the effectiveness of this approaches is overwhelming. In this blog I focus on two publications that encourages this teaching practices
The first paper is Digital fabrication and ‘making’in education: The democratization of invention, analyses some of the history and work done in maker labs (or fabrication labs, FabLab) in education (Blikstein, 2013). In his paper, the author focuses on principles empowered by having an in school maker lab, including the benefit of allowing students to extend their various class projects instead of building prototypes to quickly rid off once graded. He also points out the benefit of creating a platform for students to easily mingle create connections with students of similar interests while avoiding the gender bias: where the maker space should interest both the intelligent student as well as those who just want to explore and try out new things. Moreover Blikstein highlights the benefit of allowing multidisciplinary subjects along with the students’ own familiar practices to be integrated creatively in the fablab.
The second paper looks at technology roles in language teaching (Ibrahim, 2008). This paper mainly reviews the literature of the WH questions of educational technology, while looking at the various applications and research that took place in the area. It then goes into the distinct language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) and how technology can support learning in each area. Only a language expert can tell how each of these skills is developed, hence Ibrahim highlights those areas of potential improvement by applying the suitable benefit that technology can afford, such as immediate feedback.
Looking at Blikstein explanation of the unique collaboration experience when students find the support to carrying long term projects (p. 8):
As we will see in many of the vignettes, through several cycles of failure and redesign, students not only achieved incredibly original and complex designs, but also became more persistent, learned to work in heterogeneous teams, and became better at managing intellectual diversity.
Moreover, Ibrahim explains that collaboration activities in language classes are very useful when employed in reading activities especially for beginner level as it leads to higher students involvement in discussion. More importantly, she states that higher cognitive developments take place in a collaborative learning environment.
In a TEDx talk, Richard Culatta points out some challenges with our approaches to education, which personalized learning have the potential to solve. Collaboration in learning can be one of the ways to allow students to contribute to a task from their perspective and what they personally see valuable. Additionally, interacting with peer students have more benefits and can act as a “Cognitive Apprenticeship” as O’Donnell describes it (O’Donnell, 2012).
It is the educator’s responsibility to create the collaborative environment to her students and leverage the advantage of students bonding. Moreover, integrating making in class has its added benefits to students’ gain and can help create more opportunities to creative collaborative experiences.
References:
Blikstein, P. (2013). Digital fabrication and ‘making’in education: The democratization of invention. FabLabs: Of machines, makers and inventors, 1-21.
Ibrahim, Z. (2008). Language Teaching and Technology. Linguistics in an Age of Globalization, editors, Zeinab Ibrahim, Sanaa AM Makhlouf. Cairo: AUCPress, 1-16.
O’Donnell, A. (2012). Constructivism. In APA Educational Psychology Handbook: Vol. 1. Theories, Constructs, and Critical Issues. K. R. Harris, S. Graham, and T. Urdan (Editors-in-Chief). Washgington, DC: American Psychological Association. DOI: 10.1037/13273-003.
Hanan Alshikh 