As such, I don’t think it’s an ‘extreme position’, nor do I think it’s evidence that I don’t understand changes in the way technology is impacting upon education. If I was being bigheaded, I might take it as evidence that I had actually looked beyond the Web 2 hype. But, hey, thanks for the rant. Really.

There is no reason to take an extreme position here to support your comments. I am always amazed when folks defend what they do not really understand by taking such extreme positions. I guess it comes out of ignorance. For example, the Internet is bad and should not be used because of all of the bad stuff kids can access. They will only play games and chat. The best information is found in books. The Internet should not be used in research. Computer (and calculators) are making kids dumb because they no longer have to think. Cooperative learning is a waste of time because all kids do is chat and don’t do any work or learn anything…. All of these extreme positions are usually held by folks who really don’t understand the underlying issues, and yes, research… all that well.

But I would certainly agree that despite the research on teaching and learning, a well-grounded, knowledgeable and experienced teacher is still required to choose pedagogies and strategies that can produce the best outcomes for all students in a given culture – not necessarily the ones that worked best for them when they were in school – which is too often the case.

As such, we need to get over the idea that collaboration is the holy grail. It is ONE mode of working, and often not a very useful one. The fact that we now have access to very sexy collaborative tools does not logically mean that collaboration is the appropriate response to every challenge; we’re letting the nature of the tools dictate the nature of the work.

Surely the ultimate aim should be for students to decide whether a certain task and (to a lesser extent) their own preference demands a group-based or individual approach, and then to source the best tools to facilitate that?

I wrote more extensively on my experiences in my classroom with collaboration vs. individualism in a blog post from last month: Learned Selfishness.

I have worked mostly with teachers and on my own habits the past six years to develop professional collaborative communities within academic and often across academic departments. It takes years to establish a culture, a set of community agreements, an array of protocols, and a purpose for which to maintain a collaborative community. (If you’ve ever worked in a CFG, you know what I’m talking about.) It also requires no small amount of professional courage because real collaboration means revealing oneself to one’s peers. It requires a willingness toward self-examination, and toward the scrutiny, and criticism, and, ouch, change. The application of this into and out of the classroom also requires time and practice. What teens are doing today is a combination of revealing themselves to just about everyone in the world but in ways that are often (and I hope we can agree on this) by means of a cloak they sometimes create by the very nature of the annonimity of the medium. This is not collaboration, or cooperation in the way we need it applied in a learning environment. To be sure, it is a kind of foundation, an infrastructure on which we can build.

If the process of collaboration scares teachers, it is no less difficult for students. Still, the skill needs definition. It is not at all what cooperative learning tried to be and it usually has nothing to do with roles fulfilled within group work scenarios.