Sanet & ONL172

Technology and collaborative learning Topic 3 of the ONL172 course got me thinking about cooperation, collaboration and teamwork.  We, as South African lecturers and teachers, are constantly reminded of the benefits of group work.  We use it in our teaching, but it mostly happens with lots of students who complain about it.  If we must be honest to ourselves, we all hate group work.  We always have the situation of one person who is not doing their part of the work.  How can this be solved?  Can technology help? During our group discussions for ONL172 we realised that there is a huge amount of technology, in the form of apps, that can enhance collaborative learning and still give the individual a chance to be recognised for their part in the collaboration.  Wikispaces ( www.wikispaces.com ) is one of the wonderful tools that can be used.  I particularly liked the tracking system of the app.  It gives the facilitator the opportunity to track individual students while they’re co

All lecturers walk into a class setup with the same purpose: we want to convey information and a way of taught to our students.  This way of taught doesn’t necessary means that we want all the students to copy or mimic our ideas.  We want our students to be able to think academically and be able to defend their ideas on an academic level. Our focus during lecturing is the transfer of knowledge.  This process of transferring knowledge enables the student to become a possible master in his/her field.  To transfer knowledge, we need a tool.  PowerPoint could be such a tool.  While compiling PowerPoint slides, we don’t necessary think of ownership, we focus on the transfer of knowledge.  Some of us don’t even know who owns our PowerPoint slides.  It was interesting to see the different responses in our PBL group when we started talking about ownership.  For some academics it was strange to hear that I don’t have ownership of my PowerPoint slides.  My academic institution reserves th