TQ#6 A Quixotic Search for Elegant Learning Solutions

In the readings and during the web-conferencing research this week I became increasingly angry regarding the notion that collaboration was some sort of magic bullet and that virtual classrooms somehow facilitate the sociocognitive process better than live classrooms.

Jonassen referring to Sardamalia suggests that the best way to deal with divergent or opposing ideas is to rise above their incompatibilities. This statement is not just nonsensical, but dangerous. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. The immersion of students in collaborative environments in which there are no ideas that win or lose, or even “compromise” ideas is simply setting them up for failure. In the real, more competitive global economy the better most “right” idea wins.

Jonassen also suggests that virtual collaboration somehow creates “communities” of intrinsically motivated learners in which individual students are no longer “disconnected” or competing with each other in live classroom settings. The author’s view that online collaboration somehow removes the social communities and cliques that include some and exclude others in live classroom environments is misguided. In fact, the implied anonymity of virtual environments, without the social filters of live classrooms, might create an even “meaner” environment for more passive, disenfranchised students.

That being said, given our investigation of Illuminate and my experience with Wedex (http://www.webex.com) at B. Braun Medical, there is absolutely nothing that online web-conferencing tools offer that can’t be accomplished better in a live classroom setting. Illuminate is not at all intuitive and I needed to invest about 2-3 hours to just figure out how to navigate the application. As can be seen in the screen shot that precedes this entry, we did discover how to load and share a PowerPoint presentation and a video. As we struggled through this discovery process we used the chat box to communicate because we had challenges using the audio feature. When we finally learned how to share the audio component we used both instant messaging and audio to communicate, but the limitations of the technology were barely tolerable. The lag time between a comment made by one person, who then needed to relinquish audio control over to another, stifled the collaborative process. Beyond the inability to talk normally, the need to constantly “enable” or “disable” the application’s features to “share” content was a creativity killer.

Illuminate, like Webex, is a less expensive alternative to push out information by a very skilled moderator to a geographically dispersed audience. For example, if we need just two hours to teach sales reps in all 50 states about a new product feature, it is more timely, faster and cheaper using Webex than the travel and expense required getting everyone who needs the information into a live classroom setting. However, the tool is used as a controlled virtual classroom where information is presented, during which questions can be asked and addressed. The benefit of Webex is that it combines web-conferencing with teleconferencing applications so that the audio component more clearly mirrors a live authentic conversation. If we feel a more collaborative, interpersonal, interactive environment is required for knowledge transfer we move field sales personnel into live classroom environments. I have not yet seen a virtual tool that can improve upon the sociocognitive learning process of a great live classroom environment.

In 1871 Edward Jarvis studied 1,741 cases of insanity and concluded that too much cognitive effort was responsible for 205 of them. This study led to shortening school days and lengthening summer vacations “to reduce time spent studying, because long periods of respite could save the mind from injury” (Kenneth Gold, School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools, 2002). I believe that this American legacy of less time in the classroom, aligned with a distant western agricultural mindset, has much do with the performance of our students when compared with global peers. We spend an inordinate amount of time focused on solutions that include technology integration, reducing class size, rewriting curricula, etc., but avoid discussing one of the overarching issues related to student performance, which is the length of the time American students spend in the classroom – an average of 180 days per year. Given that South Korean Students spend 220 days a year in the classroom and Japanese students spend 243 days a year in the classroom one has to wonder why we spend so much time on ancillary, nice-to-have, academically interesting topics like the value of web-conferencing.

American students need to spend more time in classroom and work harder than they do now. They need to learn how to collaborate with others, but more emphasis needs to be focused on developing compelling arguments and leading others to action. They need to learn how to compete effectively, learning how to win gracefully and how to continuously learn through losing, or a common Chinese proverb directed at the United States will become a reality – fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn’t make if past three generations).