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Collaborative Learning: Just because you *can*, doesn't mean you *should*
By Terry Freedman
Wed, 7 Sep 2005, 10:50

Collaborative approaches to learning certainly have their place
-- but not at the expense of the facts!

In March 1923, in an interview with The New York Times, the
British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and replied, 'Because it's there'. That seems to be exactly the attitude of some educationalists when it comes to recent developments such as blogging, podcasting and
wikis. That is to say, they use thempurely and simply  because they are there.

I'm all in favour of pioneering and trailblazing, but the
downside is that evangelistic fervour can sometimes outweigh, or
cloud over, any objective judgement. In my view, what we
educationalists should be aiming for is not to get our students
and colleagues to use technology, but to use appropriate
technology appropriately. Unfortunately, that message sometimes
seems to get lost in the hubbub.

I am thinking in particular of the apparently increasing
adulation of, and reliance on, collaborative tools for the
purpose of research, especially blogs, podcasts and wikis (the
most well-known of the last is, of course, Wikipedia). In case
you are new to all this, blogs are online journals, podcasts are
recordings, usually in MP3 format, and wikis are web pages which
can be edited live on the internet, either by anybody or by
people who have subscribed to the group concerned. Wikipedia is
an online encyclopaedia which features articles which can be
published, then edited and counter-edited.

Wikipedia in particular is often hailed as a fantastic resource,
and one which has grown through collaboration by ordinary people.
It is, if you will, a perfect example of democracy in action --
apparently, at least. The question we need to ask, however, is
whether this and similar enterprises are actually useful.

For most people, and societies, the ultimate goal is absolute
truth, not relativism. This isn't only a religious quest: in the
field of finance, one of the main attributes of money is that it
should be a measure of value which does not, in itself, change
value. Hence, in modern societies, the attempts to fix a
currency's value by pegging it to gold or to another, more
stable, currency. Trying to measure the value of something if the
value of money is constantly changing is like trying to measure
the length of something with a ruler whose length keeps changing.

If relativism is not ok in our religious or economic lives, why
should it be ok in our intellectual life? We all know that
knowledge and understanding are constantly evolving, and that the
self-evident "truths" of yesteryear are sometimes found to be
wrong in the light of new evidence. That is disconcerting, to say
the least, but at least it's a process that happens over years
rather than overnight.

It's also a process that happens with the involvement of experts
in their field. Now, I am not so naive as to not understand that
viewpoints which do not fit into the convention wisdom of the age
are unlikely to be heard. You only have to look at the
experiences of Freud, Darwin and, in our own age, homeopaths and others to realise that. And the economist J M Keynes, when asked why he had failed his Economics examination at university, said that it was because he knew more about Economics than his tutors.

Nevertheless, you can't have an article published in a scientific
journal or the Encyclopedia Britannica unless it has been
scrutinised and vetted by another expert. This is in contrast to
wikis, where for the most part anybody can come along and change
an article without knowing the first thing about the subject
area. (In this regard, it's interesting to read Jason Scott's
blog.)

Now, this may seem like a very anti-democratic point of view, and
that's because it is -- in this context. If that sounds arrogant,
consider this: if you are the world's leading expert in a
particular area, do you really want some virtual passer-by to
"improve" your work by chopping bits out or adding bits in? Of
course not! But even if you are an ordinary expert, as distinct
from a world one, you will still not want someone correcting you.
At least, not in that way. You might enjoy a good debate, and be
open to have your views challenged, and may even change your
views through that process, but that, I would contend, is a very
different situation.

Even more important, though, is the potential confusion it
creates for students. Imagine finding a great fact to put in an
essay, and then double-checking it the next day, only to find
that it's disappeared. Does that means it was incorrect, or that
someone didn't like it? The only thing the student can do is to
seek verification from another source. That's good practice, but
the question is: what kind of source?

When I asked Limor Garcia, the inventor of Cellphedia (a kind of
mobile phone version of Wikipedia), how she would advise students to check the truth of the information they find, she said that
people would be able to correct each other's answers, but also
that they could check the answer in Google. That seems to me to
beg the questions: (a) if you are going to check the answer in
Google, why use Cellphedia? and (b) how would you know if the
information you found in Google is correct?

Interestingly, these kind of paradoxes are not new. In a story
called "The Library of Babel", written in 1941, the Argentinean
writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a vast library in which there
is not only a copy of every book ever written, but every book
which could be written. There is, for example, a library
catalogue, and an infinite number of variations of it. There is a
marvellous passage in which he describes the quest for the
"master" book:

"In some shelf of some hexagon, men reasoned, there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god. Vestiges of the worship of that remote functionary still persists in the language of this zone. Many pilgrimages have sought Him out. For a century they trod the most diverse routes in vain. How to locate the secret hexagon which harboured it? Someone proposed a regressive approach: in order to locate book A, first consult book B which will indicate the location of book A; in order to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum."

(J L Borges, The Library of Babel, in "Fictions")

The worrying development for me is not the invention and
expansion of tools such as Wikipedia and Cellphedia. I actually
think they have vast potential and are, in fact, tremendously
exciting. From the point of view of the learning process, taking
part in such collaboration is bound to engage or re-engage a lot
of learners.

What I am more concerned about is the often uncritical stance of
educationalists in relation to these tools. For example, I have
read articles which favourably compare Wikipedia to traditional
encyclopaedias on the basis of weight, its ability to constantly
change, its democratic ethos, and other characteristics. Surely
the most important yardstick is accuracy?

We need to teach our students a number of skills or approaches
when it comes to verifying information:

• a questioning approach rather than a willingness to accept thingsat face value
  
  
• triangulation, which is the cross-checking of supposed facts withother sources of information
  
  
• in triangulation, the use of different types or sources of evidence; for example, there is no sense in cross-checking the accuracy of the comments I've made here by looking at othercomments I've made: you should look in other sources; otherwise,it all becomes self-referential.
  

© Terry Freedman Wed, 7 Sep 2005