Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch. 8

This particular chapter dwelt with using online social tools to increase collaboration, often from Shirky's perspective towards some kind of social action, but as I noted in the previous chapter, schools currently do not do social engagement well (poverty engagement, meaning helping the poor, doing food drives, etc, they do better and more often). Schools also manage collaboration in a limited notion only, at least in my city.

For the most part, collaboration is limited to students taking the same course, from the same teacher, at the same time. Increasingly, out-of-school collaboration has come under fire as homework policies become revised to take into account the extra demands on student life outside of school as well as changes to assessment policies that seek to limit the amount of work done for assessment outside of the direct observation of the teacher. Furthermore, programs of choice and increased suburban cachement areas also means that students are physically tending to live farther and farther apart, inhibiting again their ability to get together.

The rise of various content management systems would superficially seem to be capable of reversing this trend, as their data capture techniques allow for chronicling user activities. However, again, we see these systems being set up to reinforce the District ->School -> Teacher-> Class file structure, with very little cross-over. Only recently have some teachers in my district started experimenting in Desire2Learn using the 'cohort' function, a tool with some potential to allow cross-class collaboration under the same teacher.

Ideally though, any online education system would give students the freedom to collaborate with any other student who wanted to collaborate with them at any given time without the current restrictions of School-> Teacher-> Class. Once students are given their unique user identifier linked to their demographic data, we have all their key School->Teacher->Class data on hand and should be able to track them across the system fairly easily. If our assessment activities are linked explicitly to outcomes from the Programs of Studies, it would not only help establish a context for student work common across all schools and classrooms, but also help foster a standard for collaboration among teachers from different schools as well.