Cooperative and Collaborative Learning

Glen, a former Ed Tech graduate student, once provided a vivid explanation of the difference between the two in my interview of him. "Cooperative learning, " he said, "is more like `divide-and-conquer', while collaborative learning is more like `the butting of heads'. " When the busy graduate students are facing time constraints and multiple commitments, they are more likely to cooperate, or to get as much done in the given hours (efficiency), than collaborate, that is spending hours on arguing or negotiating before reaching a consent (effectiveness). So even though collaboration is desired, cooperation often dominates in reality.

Although the role of instructor was not a focus in the study by Curtis and Lawson(2001), I would argue that mediation of instructor plays an important part in promoting collaboration. When learners are experienced collaborative learners, instructor's mediation might be viewed as intrusive or even annoying, but when learners do not have the necessary collaborative learning skills, which is more often the case, assistance from instructors become critical. The questions then would be: to what extent do instructors need to provide help, and what types of help are most effective in which context?

Another question related to research method is how to analyze the threads of asynchronous online discussion postings and emails. Studies on CL more or less shared a similar theoretical foundation of collaborative/cooperative learning by Dillenbourg, Johnson and Johnson, etc., the coding and the following themes or categories could vary a lot.

Johnson and Johnson (1994) listed group processing as one of the five basic conditions for cooperative learning. Here they seemed to emphaszie the "positive" and "promtive" side of group processing, or group dynamics. Group processing could have other downside implications, too. In some samll group reasearch papers [i.e., Mejias (2005) ], process gains refer to the benefits such as group learning, synergy, while process losses may include dominance, evluation apprehension, information overload, production blocking, and of course, social loafing.