A new column of mine just appeared. It’s about the future of collaboration and its impact on education. I posit a transformed collaboration space, “a planetary field of collaborative play, uneven and dynamic.”
This has huge implications for education.
…schools need to rethink a series of issues. What happens to communication pedagogy, sensitivity training, civics curriculum, digital literacy when the field is no longer the established one of locality and nation? IT resources will be increasingly stressed, from bandwidth to training to machines. Archiving of collaboration records becomes ever more challenging. Issues of privacy and intellectual property return.
Moreover:
Teaching and learning morphs into something new in this world of always-on, usually distant collaboration. How do we structure project-based learning when students naturally reach out to elsewhere for help and co-creation? Remember the old open-source adage: the best experts are elsewhere. How do we nurture collaboration habits with people we neither see nor know? Are we ready to teach and support teaching on a planetary stage? How do students, staff, and instructors do our jobs when the school’s walls no longer matter?
It’s third in a series on the Future of Higher Education for Educause Quarterly. The previous columns look at the future of scholarly publication and the emerging classroom.
