September 2000 — EduNet
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Students Benefit From Collaborative Learning in the Classroom
Top-down management and 9-to-5 workdays are yesterday’s news. Today’s anytime-anyplace work environment demands sophisticated communication skills, a flair for teamwork, respect for diversity, and a talent for ad hoc decision-making. Further, many companies have a global presence and a distributed work environment.
To be successful, young people need these collaborative school-to-work skills. However, these skills are not intuitive. Collaborative learning must be taught, and the Internet can be a remarkable teaching tool.
When educators think about the Internet, they tend to emphasize its usefulness for research, but they overlook its role in collaborative learning. It can encourage students to work together, form partnerships with their community, and use their creativity to communicate with and inform others from around the world.
Early on, as a Title I middle school teacher, I saw the impact that shared learning had on my students. Kids who became bored when they were merely working for the teacher and for grades became highly motivated when they could share ideas with their peers.
Kids are naturally social creatures who love to pass notes and talk on the phone. What some educators dismiss as a lack of concentration can be a powerful learning tool. How, I wondered, do you transform that sociability and testing of new ideas into formal learning outcomes? As early as 1983, I felt I might find an answer — if not the answer — in the fledging online world.
Teachers and parents have always understood that hanging a child’s picture or essay on the wall is pleasurable and motivational for that child. But online communication adds a dramatic new dimension.
Publishing your own work on the Web for a global audience is motivational, and therefore educational. When this type of shared learning became available, children began to use more formal language in their writing. Their dictionary skills improved as they sought to be understood and to make a good impression.
Based on our initial classroom experiences, my partner, Al Rogers, and I created the Free Educational Mail Network (FrEdMail) in 1984, a distributed education network dedicated to online collaborative learning and teacher support services. This grassroots effort to connect classrooms around the world grew rapidly and eventually became the Global Schoolhouse, which is now part of Lightspan.com.
CyberFair 2000
CyberFair, a five-year-old creation of the Global Schoolhouse, is a collaborative learning resource. As a model for what happens in the modern, high-tech workplace, CyberFair can more than hold its own.
