- Learning is an active process
- Learning requires learners to process and synthesize information
- Learners benefit when exposed to diverse viewpoints
- Learning flourishes in a social environment
- Learners are required to articulate and defend their ideas
- Learners converse with peers, present and defend ideas, exchange diverse beliefs, question conceptual frameworks, and are actively engaged.
Traditional learning (lecture from a teacher to a student) does not fully meet some criteria and completely fails to meet others. For example, most lectures do not encourage participation, especially those of large class sizes. Most lectures also do not allow students to synthesize information; they generally require students only to regurgitate information in exams. In other words, lecturing is a one-way street that allows information flow to operate in one direction which generally "works" (as it has been for hundreds of years) but is not ideal.
On the other hand, learning through social media meets all 6 criteria mentioned above in the following ways:
- Participants actively blog, tweet, video-blog, and reply
- Participants read others' posts and then write their own either in response or separately
- Social networks are open to people of all ages, races, ethnicity, and religions
- Social networks are platforms that create social environments
- Participants regularly attack, defend, and clarify others' and their own posts
- Participants have tens to hundreds of people with which they communicate, debate, exchange ideas, question frameworks, and engage
Hi Healy, you certainly did a fantastic job with this blog post. You provided a good introduction by defining collaborative learning rather well. I really like how you described the general consensus on learning also – you structured it well by providing the 6 key points. I very much appreciate how you critiqued the method of traditional learning and you highlighted the key points well. My favourite part of this post was how you tied it back to learning through social media and provided 6 key points for that also. Fundamentally, you clearly and concisely articulated your ideas and arguments so the post was easy to follow and understand. On the other hand, it would have been great if you tied this back to the IEOR 190G class more by providing specific examples. This blog post seemed to be too general to my mind and didn’t really focus on our patent engineering class. Moreover, you should have provided suggestions on how we can improve this way of learning, how other professors could implement it and why they should. Along with this, a critique of crowdsourcing would also have been great to provide more balance to the argument. Overall you did a great job in terms of structure and clearly presenting your points, but in-depth detail would have been better seeing as this was our last assignments. Other than that, well done!
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ReplyDeleteHi Healy, Great job summarizing benefits of collaborative learning by contrasting it with the traditional learning. It’s a great way to begin the post by listing what we believe about learning as it puts all readers on the same playing page. Traditional learning has many of the disadvantages you mentioned in the blog. It has these disadvantages largely because of the many limitation. With resource restrictions, it is simply very hard to to a low student-to-teacher ratio that encourages active participation. However, social media enabled by internet is changing the landscape of learning. It can build a vibrant peer-to-peer learning environment that was not possible before. Our two direction learning facilitated by blog posts and comments provide cases in point. I think you can improve this blog post by more explicitly incorporating what we did in class as examples of collaborative learning. Overall, I learned a lot about collaborative learning. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteHi Healy, Great job summarizing benefits of collaborative learning by contrasting it with the traditional learning. It’s a great way to begin the post by listing what we believe about learning as it puts all readers on the same playing page. Traditional learning has many of the disadvantages you mentioned in the blog. It has these disadvantages largely because of the many limitation. With resource restrictions, it is simply very hard to to a low student-to-teacher ratio that encourages active participation. However, social media enabled by internet is changing the landscape of learning. It can build a vibrant peer-to-peer learning environment that was not possible before. Our two direction learning facilitated by blog posts and comments provide cases in point. I think you can improve this blog post by more explicitly incorporating what we did in class as examples of collaborative learning. Overall, I learned a lot about collaborative learning. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteHealy, not only was your blog post very concise and organized, but you managed to touch all the points I was trying to make myself! I completely agree with you that the traditional lecture/homework format does not allow us to engage with the material as much, leading us to not be able to synthesize the information as much. Hence collaborative learning is definitely the way to go! The only downside I found from this class to this is that we were not able to hear feedback from the instructor this way, which I am used to depending on for content feedback.
ReplyDeleteWow, I really like the organization of your blog post. Good job adding an easy to read list that included highlighting the important parts. I am not sure where you read about or came up with those points about what learning should accomplish, but I definitely agree with most of them.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I think what you brought up was more catered to what social learning is. Learning doesn't necessarily have to always be a social process, although it may make the process easier. Some topics can be learned by ones self. My viewpoint is instead that the social aspect to our class is that it makes it far easier to absorb the material. Defending our own viewpoints through way of collaborative learning helps the process, but its necessarily needed.
Hi there!
ReplyDeleteGreat job on discussing the merits of social media learning. Although I knew a lot of the points you were discussing, I definitely did not know they could be categorized and organized how you presented them! This goes to show that there is clear evidence of the merits of collaborative learning, and I was able to see that you really thought about how much these impact the way we can potentially learn about a subject. Overall, I agree with your points and thought you organized your ideas very clearly!
Wow this is such a great post. I like how you start off by explaining what learning means and then tying it back to social media learning. It is great how much we can learn from social media. Before this course I thought social media was just a place to converse about non issues. But now, I realize how powerful of a tool social media is.
ReplyDeleteHey Healy,
ReplyDeleteI really like how you described learning in school, especially our very large lectures as a one-way street. I completely agree with this because most of the times these classes do not provide the opportunity to synthesize information or discuss it, rather regurgitated it later in an exam as you said. I don't find this to be a very beneficial method of learning and prefer the method we used in this class. I like how you explained how learning through social media meets all the criteria for a student to properly learn and retain information. Do you think there are any downsides to this type of learning? Thanks for sharing the interesting post!