Collaboration represents an extremely important aspect of online learning, a virtual education experience. Students in various locations, globally, have the opportunity to interact and share their interpretations, analysis, improve upon, and draw conclusions concerning a specific topic, assignment, or even explore across several disciplines. With the concept of collaboration, learners must have the ability to learn differently. Instead of independent and isolated studies, students share information between themselves prior to arriving at a final conclusion in their studies. They discover the ability to share information electronically without concern of language, cultural, or socioeconomic barriers.
Participants learn teamwork in a virtual environment. For the true values of collaboration to become evident, learners must learn to work together to establish learning and achievement goals. This requires a vital interaction between learners and and mentors allowing for a variety of perspectives and insights into the topic of choice. The development of web applications , available through Web 2.0 tools, has transformed the Internet into a highly interactive tool, which may be used to assist in the process of sorting, classifying, and evaluating information. The development of authoring, classification, and presentation applications allow for collaborators to rapidly assimilate data for evaluation in compare and contrast activities, leading to comprehensive evaluations and potentially life altering solutions.
Wikipedia, one of the first online reference wikis, offers the following definition:
Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals —
For example, it is an intellectual endeavor, that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.
Collaboration does not require leadership and can sometimes bring better results through decentralization and egalitarianism.
In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources.
Collaboration is also present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration, though this notion is atypical of the annotation that people have given towards their understanding of collaboration.
Structured methods of collaboration encourage introspection of behavior and communication. These methods specifically aim to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving. Forms, rubrics, charts and graphs are useful in these situations to objectively document personal traits with the goal of improving performance in current and future projects.
Tools of Collaboration
Web 2.0 tools help users gain access to new or better organized data using a variety of web applications that allow for file creation, file sharing, and file collaborations to create improved results. Web applications improve the collaboration process by allowing the Internet to serve as a common resource to deliver a wide variety of data sources to learners without requiring the programs to be loaded on each learner's personal computer, Web applications are programs that are available to Internet users via the usage of a web browser, written in a web based language such as HTML, XHTML, and other web supported languages. Web applications are virtual in nature in that web access is the qualifying determinate for usage. In addition, web applications must offer Rich Internet application programs (RIAs). These programs are designed to increase productivity through increased accessibility, communications, and consistency across browser platforms. One example is the use of Google Docs as a collaboration tool across multiple platforms.
Google Docs as a Facilitator of Collaboration
Collaboration can be accomplished through the use of web application programs such as the Google documents (Google Docs) program. Once a Google account is established, I did this by creating a free G-mail account, collaboration may begin. Next, I used the drop arrow at the top of the sign-on page to explore "More," and I also used the drop arrow to explore "even more." On the menu page, I selected Google Docs icon and was able to create a document.
Google Docs offers a complete set of web applications in a form somewhat similar to Microsoft Office suite. The program offers spread sheets, word document sheets, presentation software, and other helpful organization tools such as a calender. Documents can be shared among collaborators that have Internet access. Documents can also be hyper-linked to give users the feel of a web page and accessibility to the Internet. This feature is a distinct improvement over older software document programs.
Impact on Education
The usefulness of Web 2.0 on education and learning is remarkable. The impact is that there are initiatives of Education 2.0 and Learning 2.0 as well as Business 2.0. Education has a great opportunity to expand greatly through the use of collaborative tools such as WebQuest that help students form teams that can be used to guide the exploring, gathering, and analysis of small student learning group.
A WebQuest is a scaffolded learning structure that uses links to essential resources on the
World Wide Web and an authentic task to motivate students' investigation of an openended
question, development of individual expertise, and participation in a group process
that transforms newly acquired information into a more sophisticated understanding. The
best WebQuests inspire students to see richer thematic relationships, to contribute to the
real world of learning, and to reflect on their own metacognitive processes. (March, 2007)
References
March, T. (2007). Revisiting WebQuests in a Web 2 World. How developments in technology and pedagogy combine to scaffold personal learning. Interactive Educational Multimedia, Number 15 (October, 2007), 1-17
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