Learning and Re-Learning

For example, one semester in my course, "The Teachings of Jesus," two notable American biblical scholars, Luke Timothy Johnson and John Dominic Crossan, joined the course discussion list, although not simultaneously. Learners (alias, "students") worked in groups to compose the most significant questions (or comments) to put to the online, virtual guest scholar. They could then follow up responses with more questions or comments. It was as a recapitulation of the learning process in miniature.

In other instances, my World Religions course was in discussion list contact with a class of college students in Japan, with faculty and students at a college in Israel (in spite of a bombing nearby and a student strike), with a former professor turned monastic who talked with my students from her meager lodging in the hills overlooking Florence, Italy, with a group of students at BYU-Hawaii who came from all over the Pacific Rim and South America, with an American Buddhist jazz pianist in southern California who practices chanting the Lotus Sutra, with a Catholic priest at a church in Russia, etc.

Not only was there cooperative work in formulating ideas and questions, but that very cooperation helped nudge some learners into a different model of learning. Something the very asking of questions of a virtual guest is a way to integrate the academic and the personal as in the questions of a student for our online hermit in Italy. The model was ancient, but new to those who had only really experienced a relentlessly teacher-centered model beginning in grade 1.

Another collaborative means is voluntary participation in creating an issue of a course's journal, for which a group of students is totally responsible, from ideation to final publication on the course discussion list. What I most value in this activity is the potential for learners to take the initiative and realize that their work is for a real audience of their peers, not simply a private communication to the professor.

Before I started incorporating email and email discussion lists into my courses, collaborative work meant only meeting in groups during class time and perhaps in groups outside of class, if the complex problem of finding a time and place for all to meet could be overcome… and if the decision of one or more in a group to ride on the backs of the others in the group could be addressed effectively.

The Recognition of Intrinsic Value

Rating Collaborating