Collaborative learning

To deal with non foundational knowledge - where there are no certainties of fact or opinion - there cannot be a leader or central authority, so, there has to be a transition from a closely controlled, teacher-centred system to a student-centred system, where the teacher and students share authority and control of learning.

This collaborative learning shifts the responsibility for learning away from the teacher and on to the student. The student is seen as being responsible for the results of his or her own learning, knowledge construction and organisation. Learning is seen as a process of interdependence where solutions and answers are possible only through accessing the opinions and knowledge of others.

Students are seen as each having a boundary of individual knowledge and opinion. They have to negotiate at that boundary with others, who also have boundaries. Groups are not formed through conventions, rules and protocols, but, by a melding of these boundaries to produce a common boundary that brings people into association.

In this way, each student draws from a distributed pool of knowledge, taking from it their own needs to build their individual cognitive models that they can use to make their own unique judgements and decisions. There is no compulsion for these models to be identical or even similar, there is simply the restraint that they must be compatible or complementary with others in the group.

The role of the teacher in this situation is simply to provide the right atmosphere and ambience for students to interact in a way where information, ideas, knowledge and opinions are freely exchanged and the students are able to test out their cognitive models on each other.

The essence of this process is that nobody tries to convince or influence others. Disagreements occur where there is a conflict of opinion, but, the pressure is not on trying to change the thoughts of others: disagreement is a signal for self reflection and a reappraisal of one's own knowledge base and methods of reasoning. This is in sharp contrast to the cooperative learning process, where uniformity of thought and thinking processes is important and the pressure is for people to be brought into common alignment.

This way of learning requires a radical paradigm shift because it is counter intuitive. Instinctive reactions to a differing of opinions would see a struggle for the proponents to convince each other of the error of their ways. With collaboration there is a respect for differing opinions and they are regarded as something to learn from and associate with rather than to change.

Disagreement and intellectual conflict in a collaborative learning situation are thus seen as desirable features of a group learning exercise. It forces individuals to consider new information and to be able to apply their cognitive understanding to new settings. It brings exposure to different points of view to allow students a more objective examination of an environment and offers the opportunity to see perspectives other than their own.