The TES Make The Link campaign, with its excellent seven-step guide to linking with other schools, and its useful website forums of good ideas, reminds us just how effective ICT has been in bringing learners together collaboratively. I’m often blamed for putting the communication, the C, into ICT and, indeed, it probably is my fault that a thousand posters (“Get on with IT” etc) were ruined by the change. But this has never been just information and technology. So often, where IT simply “delivered” information, ICT now builds collaboration and communities in a way that gives everyone an active role.
This is not new. The Times Network for School and BT’s Campus service, way before the web, showed how communicating across distance allowed some remarkable learning to occur. Imaginative teachers were busy inventing extraordinary projects that allowed their students to collaborate with others all around the world. It is hard to remember now just how beguiling email, that pioneer of the “e” prefixes, was for first-time users as they typed, sent mail and received replies from the other side of the world, sometimes in minutes. In project after project it is the power of collaboration that shines through as hugely motivating for learners, across the world.
Kickstarting collaboration
At the beginning of the 1990s the pivotal Learning in the New Millennium project, led by Carole Chapman and including Jean Johnson, now head of the Notschool.net charity, took cutting-edge technology of the day and gave it to primary and secondary children and to the scientists and engineers in the research labs of sponsors Nortel. The project team then devised some smart projects to kickstart collaborative activity between everyone. By the time the conclusions were presented, at a Tomorrow’s World live show in Earls Court, the power of that collaboration shone through.
Online, youngsters in primary schools were indistinguishable from their secondary collaborators or, in some instances, from the scientists and engineers. And Nortel’s team gained, too, as they honed their communication and explanation skills. Everyone’s learning accelerated. The project directly informed the Stevenson Report that defined New Labour’s incoming commitment to ICT in learning, a commitment that has been as unshakeable as it has been effective.
Towards the end of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to help launch Ulf Lundin’s EU- funded Schoolnet project in Brussels. The project, and indeed Ulf, are both still going strong, propelled by the simple dream that classes of children in schools could engage in collaborative projects together. Schoolnet is now supported by 26 European ministries of education and supports a host of collaborative ventures - from worthily celebrating Europe to a compelling swap of school cultures - and has grown over the years to embrace support for small rural school and open architecture in schools. Schoolnet shows that if you provide tools for collaboration, and have patience, a huge diversity of outcomes can result.
Not just for school children
But online collaboration is not just for school children. Many CPD projects have shown just how effectively, and rapidly, change can occur if professionals are brought together online in a community of practice. In the UK, the vast community of headteachers, Talking Heads, that became the foundation of the NCSL, showed how collaboration between very different schools could be more effective by collaborating online. While on the other side of the world the Navigator Schools in Australia celebrate their many collaborative years of pioneering ICT in learning with the swap-fest conference that is NAVCON, a bustling mass of practitioner workshops that now involves the whole Pacific Rim, from New Zealand to Singapore.
Of all our recent education ministers, Charles Clarke understood most clearly the power of collaboration to accelerate learning and bridge cultures. He had a real passion to see the wonderful opportunities that ICT had brought UK schools shared with others, and a sense that by bringing communities together through collaborative learning we might close some of the cultural gaps around the world. It is indeed ironic that he is now, as Home Secretary, inheriting a mess that such collaborative endeavour might have softened a little.
Suddenly, online collaboration has a really big role to play in our world and it is in that context that the TES Make the Link is particularly welcomed. It is just the engine to make Charles Clarke’s dreams come true.
Closer ties
Examples of sites with more collaborative information.
- Collaborative games
Research exploring collaborative games offers real insights into players working together. At the Future Applications Lab at Sweden’s Viktoria Institute, players shared games across several screens of handheld devices with some tricks (pick up a virtual carrot and your partner’s screen inverts). Fun, but collaboration and conversation improved, too.
www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/collgames/
- Design for collaboration
Designing a school for collaborative rather than individual work is a tough challenge, although there are plenty of clues in the design of spaces for the creative industries. Start with School Works, which has a host of good ideas resulting from their careful strategy of involving students, teachers and the community in the design process.
www.schoolworks.org/sharing.asp
- Collaborative degree
The Ultraversity work-placed online degree treats its students as a key resource. It requires a strong degree of collaboration between them and then assesses that. As one student commented, "At first I was very sceptical about the use of community for learning. I did not trust the concept of learning from other ordinary people. Soon I realised that these researchers were extraordinary people, with a wealth of knowledge and especially experience among them".
www.ultraversity.net
- RSA curriculum
The RSAs new curriculum grew out of their "Open Minds" initiative, and has collaboration at its heart for learners and teachers. It contains a set of competencies specifically for relating to other people. The RSA says, “The result has been radical change in the structure of teaching and learning. The schools have experienced some quite stunning improvements".
www.rsa.org.uk/projects/curriculum_network.asp
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