True Collaboration?

[Britt Gow]

Daniel Rezac has written an interesting article about how many so-called 'collaborative' projects are nothing more than a 'drop box' for student work. Read it here: http://mr-rezac.blogspot.com/
I tend to agree that we are barely beginning to truly collaborate on a global scale. And I fear there will always be a significant proportion of the world's population who will never have access to the kinds of technology that allows true collaboration across continents.

[Catherine Lombardozzi]

Thanks for sharing this post... very interesting. My thoughts grew into this week's post on my blog. http://learningjournal.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/are-we-using-collab...

[Britt Gow]

Thanks Catherine - insightful and so relevant! Teachers at our school are so excited by having access to these technologies, but we still have a long way to go to use them to improve learning.

[Lore Reß]

I just read the article, but I cannot fully agree. Of course there are a lot of 'drop boxes' but the real collaboration is not done in public. When collaboratingn, you are working in a team, in a project. Usually these plattforms are not public, but only for team members. According to my experience, in such "private" environment, collaboration is working.

Daniel Rezac is right for the projects he mentioned, these are 'drop boxes'

[John McDermott]

I have to agree with Lore. Part of my life has been in the tech world. I've worked on lots of collaborative projects. Eight years ago I did one with participants in Virginia, New Mexico and London. We worked on shared documents, had a tool that was wiki-like (no need for the real thing for many reasons), and shared computer screens. It wasn't hard, it just wasn't mainstream.

[Virginia Yonkers]

I agree with those above. A lot has to do with how we define collaborative learning (which I addressed in my blog rather than write out here because it was too long!)