Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

Some reflection for topic 3. I find all three suggestions interesting and relevant to my own experience so I will respond to all three:

An occasion when real collaborative learning took place, that moved your own thinking forward

One occasion that really struck me happened during my postdoc in the context of a research manuscript. My postdoc supervisor told me that our paper would not be taken seriously unless we had experts from disciplines related to the topic on which we were trying to publish. We found the requisite experts but my supervisor wouldn’t let me submit until we got their feedback which annoyed me because I thought their role was “author line decoration”. The experts provided rapid feedback and had really really insightful, simple, but almost impossible to address comments that made me question the entire manuscript. We worked together on the details and the manuscript and the final submitted version was vastly superior. I now try to include experts from tangential but relevant fields in all of my research as there is no substitute from the collaborative learning that they bring.

Your own Personal Learning Networks – how have they developed and how they could be taken further

My own personal learning networks have developed through necessity where I need input with topics that I don’t understand and which nobody at my home institution can help. Many senior colleagues have been very gracious with their time. I think the personal learning networks can be taken farther by formalizing them; writing a joint project together which funds the exchange of students. I think this is a bit outside the scope of ONL but I believe my online network learning network would be taken much further with significant offline efforts.

Reflect on how you can use technologies to enable your own networks for learning processes

The best technologies for enabling my learning process is limitless, easy access cloud storage. We routinely rely on our learning networks to help us understand our data and how to process it. Without easily accessible cloud storage, we could never give them access to the content necessary for exchange of ideas. My universities commitment to commercial cloud storage services with nearly unlimited storage space means we don’t have to curate content in the interest of file size and risk excluding something important.