Mass Collaboration

Are we preparing students for a world of mass collaboration?

If the discussions on the Wikinomics blog of mass collaboration going on in the work place, e.g. Best Buy, and the (somewhat cheesy) video entitled Microsoft's Vision of 2010



are any indication of what mass collaboration will look like, I'd say we're still behind in preparing students for this kind of a world.

How and how often do we ask students to collaborate? Is it collaboration to accomplish a common goal or is it online sharing and commenting? Yes, that's a bit of a rhetorical question, and I'm suggesting it's more often the latter.

But to be fair, when I was in school, the criticism was that school didn't teach any collaboration. I'd say we collaborated naturally to get some homework done, although the collaboration was often asymmetric and involved one student carrying the others. Nowadays, group-work with defined roles seems to be a standard part of Elementary and Middle School classrooms. (I haven't seen enough HS classrooms to comment about them.)

However, I'd say the collaboration in schools nowadays is still not as virtual as it should be if we are preparing students for future mass collaboration. That may still be related to technology limitations, but I'd say there is another limiting factor: teachers.

And that brings me to the next question: How do we prepare students for a world of mass collaboration.

I'll venture an alternative answer to this question: Start mass collaborating ourselves. I think teaching mass collaboration will be artificial if we aren't doing it ourselves, not as models for the students, but to meet our own needs. I'm guilty of and have seen other teachers sticking to old paper-and-pencil or Web 1.o habits when working together. How often do we say: Everybody send me your thoughts in an email and I'll compile them. Wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity for a Wiki? Yes, but at what cost? Time, of course. So we remain in our old ways.

I may not be answering the question about how to prepare students, but I'm not addressing it specifically to make the point that we can't understand how to prepare students if we are not preparing ourselves for mass collaboration.