Week 2 - Online collaboration

Introduction

You spent quite a lot of time in the Induction and Week 1 activities telling us about yourselves and learning about the others in the course. These activities correspond to Gilly Salmon's (2004) stages 1 and 2. See her useful and multifaceted model. This week the focus shifts to actively working with others. We are working at Salmon's stages 2 & 3, moving into stage 4.

Online communication is about people interacting with each other and ultimately working with each other to construct knowledge. But this does not happen all by itself. Academic online environments may be inhibiting to newcomers. The nature and tempo of interactions may be unfamiliar and disorienting, people are put together by an external agency rather than by their own choice, to do things that they do not choose or even necessarily want to do, for purposes that involve judgment and measurement of their capabilities in new domains.

This week we start exploring how to manage these issues. This is a very big area, and there is not much time. So our approach will be experiential and collaborative. You are going to work in groups, share ideas and experiences and reflect on that process. We will start by focusing on team roles and organisation. The following precepts underpin this activity:

Further relevant concepts

As well as the activities there is quite a bit of reading this week. Start with the course text, chapters 13 & 14 of Macdonald (2008). Anderson and Garrison’s Community of Inquiry model of online learning offers the concept of social presence, which you may find useful in this week's activities. Social presence is ’the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g. course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop interpersonal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities’ (Garrison, 2009). There are three elements to social presence:

Follow the link above to further information about each of these.

Salmon's (2004) five stage model of online learning has been highly influential and some of you may prefer this to the Community of inquiry model.

As always, the Key Readings for the week are listed below, along with other readings to follow up on if you wish.

Key readings

  1. Am I wearing any clothes?
  2. Considerations in designing online collaborative tasks
  3. Group roles
  4. Collaboration online or face-to-face: what's the difference?
  5. Anderson and Garrison’s Community of Inquiry model of online learning
  6. MacDonald, J. (2008). Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: Planning Learner Support and Activity Design (Second edition). Aldershot, Gower. Chapters 13 & 14.

References and further resources