In this video, Shirky talks about how the Internet and various digital communication tools are changing the way organizations are structured. 21st century tools facilitate the formation of collaborative groups in which cooperative communication strategies are built into the structure of the organization. Anyone can become a member of these groups and they can contribute as much or as little as they want. Shirky cites the Flickr photo sharing web community, Linux, open source software, file sharing and Wikipedia as examples of cooperative systems. This model flies in the face of traditional 20th century institutions.
Education is one such institution. According to Shirky, as organizations move toward the new collaborative model, institutions are going to come under increasing pressure and the more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the more pressure they will be under. Conversely, loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage. The more those groups forgo traditional institutional imperatives like deciding in advance what’s going to happen and the profit motive, the more leverage they will have. Imagine the transformational leverage of an educational system based on a collaborative social model rather than a rigid institution.
Shirky points out that the rising popularity of blogging has the potential to make professional journalism irrelevant. If that is true, then the development of cooperative social learning communities as an alternative to traditional educational institutions has the potential to do the same to the teaching profession.
This week, we also examined two more teaching strategies to enhance student learning.
Cooperative Learning
I learned quite a bit about the pros and cons of cooperative learning strategies from the two classroom teachers in my small group. Cooperative learning can certainly lead to successful academic outcomes under the right circumstances; like when students with diverse learning styles can be grouped together to take advantage of each group members' strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. However, difficulties can arise when not every student puts forth the same amount of effort, they disagree on goals and strategies or they have personality conflicts. Groups can also be difficult to manage and coordinate and pose certain challenges for assessing each student's grade based on their contribution to the final product.
Reinforcing Effort
It stands to reason that reinforcing effort will lead to better academic achievement. The classroom teachers in my group have anecdotal evidence that even seemingly small gestures of encouragement can have considerable impact on student participation and performance. However, I recently attended a meeting where a virtual school leader related a pilot program where an extrinsic motivation program was implemented. Students could earn points by completing assigned work and scoring well on tests and could then exchange those points for prizes or turn them into a donation to charity. The program seemed good in theory, but the school found it difficult to get students to participate and those that did saw very nominal academic gains - certainly not enough to justify the $19,000 price tag for the program. So it seems that intrinsic factors have a greater impact than extrinsic motivators when it comes to reinforcing effort.
I also found Shirky's Ted talks quite thought-provoking. He is right on the money in terms of how collaborative work is shaping up online. The difficult part is changing the mindset of traditional society--and the education world is often at the tail end of any kind of change.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned gaining insight from the teachers in your study group regarding cooperative learning and reinforcing effort. As someone who is not teaching in the classroom, do you find ways to apply these learning strategies among your colleagues or in your work setting?
I have found some of the learning strategies to be useful outside the classroom. Certainly cooperative learning takes place in our professional learning communities and in committee work amongst my virtual academy colleagues throughout the country. I have used reinforcing effort with my employees.
ReplyDeleteI will totally agree that extrinsic motivations are seldom as powerful as intrinsic motivations. I find that my students are much more excited about words of encouragement and recognition of their efforts than they are about any small prize that I might bestow on them. Honestly I have found that telling a student that they are good at something is a much better motivator than almost anything else I have tried (candy, gifts, etc.) I'd love to hear about the words of encouragement that your virtual academy colleagues use to get students to achieve more.
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