Steven Downes gave a talk on The Applications of Social and Collaborative Technologies in Education where he discusses the factors for success in online communities. Mike Seyfang then responded in this post by posing an open question about the ability of institutions to adapt learning to suit the collaborative nature of the read/write web. This seemed like a good place to start thinking about a framework for measuring the learning in the EdTechTalk community.

Brian Copolla describes the difference between cooperative and collaborative learning as differentiated by things like autonomy, locus of control and authority. He makes a distinction between the types of knowledge that each is good for. Cooperative for ‘basic knowledge where clear definitions exist’ and collaborative for ‘conditional knowledge… such as the edges of a debate’. My thoughts are that most learning sits somewhere along a continuum between having strong teacher control or cooperative towards collaborative where the learner has most of the control. Within any community it may be helpful to have a mix of elements that promote one or the other in order to achieve the greatest overall result.  This mix will change overtime as both the community and the learners needs change.

The purpose of the community and the needs of the learners may also be a factor in determining the mix of control. For example if the purpose of the community is to prepare for a particular assessment task the environment and interactions would be different a learning experience using a community to figure out how to update my Itunes software. Additionally the readiness of the learner needs to be considered. For example if you have a community that is heavily based on reading lots of blogs and analysing the content then maybe it is important to scaffold the learning to include a more structured introduction to the technologies used.

In his talk Downes discusses some other factors important to collaborative learning such as diversity of learners, technology, openness and connectivity. I think of each of these as dials that can be turned by creating different types of experiences to balance cooperation and collaboration to the benefit of individual learners and the community as a whole.

For me it’s a journey that mixes experience (particularly of the people) with adventure (my own learning decision along the way).

As I analyse my own experience in the community the questions I’ll be considering are:

• How are the community members organised? Does this support learning?
• How diverse is the discussion within the community? Does this add to the overall depth of learning?
• If a discussion is important to me how easy is it to start a conversation? Who participates?
• How easily can I apply the learning gained in the community?
• How have I participated in discussions that I wouldn’t normally engage in? Have I experienced additional learning because of this?
• Does the technology facilitate the learning experiences? How?
• Do the relationships within the community facilitate the learning experiences? How?