1. Cooperative Learning in the Classroom
Cooperation is working together to accomplish shared goals, cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize everyone’s learning. Instruction grounded in cooperative learning embraces communities of practice, where members of an educational community pursue a shared enterprise. “Students participate in a range of practices or activities. It is through engaging in such practices that the group negotiates meanings of what it is to be a member of this community” (futurelab, 2006). Through this negotiated participation, reification of a superior educational product becomes possible.[ Reification: process by which elements of practice are congealed into a ‘thing’.] The boundaries for student participation have recently been expanded with the introduction of user-friendly social software that technologically facilitates group communication. (Clay Shirky, 2003)
And if it is true that necessity drives invention..then one would have to surmise that the recent explosion in educational social software is filling a very real need/necessity…the need to communicate with others, to express oneself – to be heard – to have one’s opinion recognized. Maybe that is happening less and less in public school classrooms as teachers and students try to accomplish more and more to meet some pre-determined guidelines for grade-level learning. The individual voice becomes silenced as federal mandates push for annual yearly progress. Social software possibly fills the need for the individual voice that can be recognized by others through electronic communication. Freedom of expression is amplified as educational control is relinquished.
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