Facilitating

Facilitating this weeks class was much harder task than I was expecting. However, I feel I pulled the most and best information from the articles and videos and posed great questions. Here is my summary and questions:

What is the difference between collaborative and cooperative learning?

         Both terms favor small group active student participation over passive, lecture based teaching. Both strategies assign group roles and encourage collaborative learning through working together to finish a specific task.  One difference is that cooperative learning is more structurally defined than collaborative learning.

        Differences can be categorized by knowledge and power. Cooperative learning is a methodology for traditional knowledge and collaborative learning is a methodology for social construct. Simpler, cooperative learning is a teacher based model where the teacher holds the authority and group tasks have specific answers, whereas collaborative learning is student based learning where groups are given complex tasks.

When these terms are used in conjunction with each other these are other terms used as well:

“team learning; problem-based learning including guided design, case studies, simulations; peer-assisted instruction including supplemental instruction, writing fellows, mathematics workshops; discussion groups and seminars; learning communities; and lab work”

• ·        What ways do you support collaborative and cooperative learning in your classrooms?
• ·         Do you use them together, separately or not at all?
• ·         Is there a strategy you feel works best?

Constructivism and Inquiry Based Learning

         Constructivism is described as the methodology that allows individuals build knowledge through their experiences. Individuals are active in the process and not passive to receiving the information. It’s stated that it is important for schools and teachers to get the students to think outside the box and thinking critically to finding solutions to the problems. The process through understanding and creating gets the students learning in a process that builds on prior knowledge and experiences. Constructivism is a theory behind the WebQuest Model and in support of inquiry based learning.

         Inquiry Based Learning is active learning by putting the learner in the center of the activity. Inquiry based learning is based on critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and problem solving. The strategy helps students become independent in thinking and generating answers to the questions.  As technology evolves in to the Web 2.0 world, inquiry based learning takes a turn into the WebQuest and World Wide Web to generate answers to the questions and elevating the learning experience.  

• ·        Do you use WebQuests for inquiry based learning?
• After exploring the resources will you start to implement WebQuests in your classrooms?
• ·         Will you create your own WebQuests?

The process of cooperation and morality of experiments with animals

         This video was very interesting for me. He speaks about different animals and how they work together, fight, make up and procreate based on cooperation, food and discipline.  Much like humans chimpanzees reconcile after fights, they hug and kiss in embrace after a fight. The pillars of morality are reciprocity and empathy. He gives examples of chimpanzees and elephants. When viewing the video of the chimpanzees they cooperate to pull in a box that has food on top, they go to another video after one chimp is already full. But through motion, gestures and communication the other chimp helps out his friend get fed. The most interesting fact was that the chimpanzees will eventually return the favor for helping his friend get food.

         In the elephants video they have an apparatus around a rope and the rope needs to be pulled simultaneously otherwise the rope disappears. The elephants come to the apparatus where food is waiting; they come together, pull together and are fed together. They make the process harder and change the way they release the elephants this now shows the intelligence of how the elephants work together to reach an end result.

Synchronization- when I yawn; you yawn. Related to empathy, activates same part of the brain.  Autistic children don’t have yawn contagion.  He did this the same thing with chimpanzees and he also experiences yawn contagion. This idea is universal in most mammals.

Consolation- When someone is upset and someone else comes over with a hand on the shoulder to calm them down.

Pro-social- Tokens and rewards system. Red means they won’t share and green means they will share.  The chimp picking the tokens will always be fed. This study showed that they did care about the welfare and wellbeing of the other chimps. The pro social token rate went down when the chimp started taunting the other. One chimp saying to the other, “If you aren’t going to behave, you won’t be fed.”

           As he continues to show the life and experiments with chimps he feels they are getting closer to fairness and that animals can have it. Experiments were done with different mammals to see the changes or differences in each.

• ·         Do you think most mammals have a sense of cooperation and empathy? Is it training or genetics?

Video-Clay Shirky about Web 2.0

          Desperate housewives, I love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island have dissipated thinking that built up and caused society to overheat. He states that, “Waking up from a cognitive bender that is now a cognitive as surplus than a crisis.”  How big is the surplus? Wikipedia in its entirety one hundred million hours of human thought. He breaks down the surplus as television watching 200 billion hours in the US alone every year, 100 million hours a weekend just watching the Ads. Very large surplus, what do we do with it? Experiment and find new ways to integrate the surplus and finding new ways to use it which eventually finds its way into society.  “Better to do something, than nothing.”

• ·         What forms of civic surplus can you also contribute?
• ·         Is there a form of Web 2.0 you think the surplus will hit first?