Our group finished the letter we were writing to Nancy Grimm today. I thought that this was a good example of collaborative learning. We were working together in groups trying to come up with a single letter that expressed all of our views and questions.
By working in this format, it took a lot longer than working individually would have. I think that it was also more useful, though. We got to hear to interpretations that others made about the article and we got to talk through the questions and views we had of this reading.
This alone was able to clarify some of the information for me personally, and I htink it also helped create a better finished product that we sent out fir this author to read. It may have taken longer and been a little more frustrating, but it was worth it in the end. It was a learning experience and a beneficially lesson in the idea of collaborative learning.
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Collaboration is Hard It is
Collaboration is Hard
It is important to realize that truly collaborative work does take longer but usually yields better, more thoughtful results than individual work. This will be important when groups come in with projects or you work as a course-assigned Writing Mentor that has a number of team projects. Often such clients are frustrated b/c they thought teamwork would make the writing easier and they don't want to face the fact that is can be difficult but productive. This is why so many students would just rather take over and do it alone and let the others coast--this product will take less time and may even be good, but it won't be as rich as it could have been and the others won't have learned what they should have through the process.
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