Students as co-creators of knowledge

Wednesday 8pm (UK time, currently GMT) is fast becoming a fixed date in my diary. Why? Because it is when the newly established 'tweet chat' 'Learning and teaching in Higher Education' (or #LTHEchat) takes place. If you are interested in learning, or teaching in HE do join us then by following the hash tag and @LTHEchat. More details on the LTHEchat blog.

It's a great way to discuss ideas with others, to think about things in new ways. Although sometimes frantic and it can be hard to express thoughts in 140 characters!

This week the topic was 'students as co-creators of knowledge', and was hosted by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks)and Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi). I wanted to reflect on some of the issues that this raised for me.

Of What?

Towards the end of this week's chat I suddenly realised I wasn't sure what we had been talking about over the last hour! Students as co-creators of what? My initial thought was that this was co-creation of knowledge, but most of the discussion was about co-creation of artefacts (videos, posters, webpages, documents etc). Ofcourse co-creation of an artefacts, may lead to co-creation of knowledge (depending on exactly what that means). But does it necessarily? Should it,even?

Vygotsky's view that higher mental processes can only be formed through social interactions implied that collaborative learning is likely to be beneficial. However, one concern I have is that when co-creating an artefact such as a video, there is the temptation to spend longer on the technical aspects of the project than on thinking about the ideas that are being presented.  For example, it took me hours to create this short 2 minute video, learning how to use 'Blender' from scratch, taking photographs etc . In terms of learning outcomes, it would perhaps have been far more efficient to spend an hour or two putting the ideas onto paper.

Ofcourse it may be that the learning outcomes involve learning the technical skills of video production, but I know from experience that even  when creating a poster or power-point presentation, this involves substantial time spend on non-conceptual thinking tasks, even when I'm fluent in the packages being used.

So the real questions for me are, a) Is co-creation of an artefact the best/most efficient way to help students to learn? And b) what is the evidence that co-creation of artefacts is beneficial, compared to learning in other ways?

Answers will ofcourse depend on the planned learning outcomes for the course, and the degree to which the activity increases motivation to learn (or conversely decreases motivation in the case of group work which has too many conflicts).

 
Co-creation of knowledge

So what is co-creation of knowledge? It seems reasonable to assume that when students work together in a problem based learning, or inquiry type activity that their joint activity and interactions will lead to each student moving from a position of unfamiliarity in the subject to (hopefully) familiarity.
However, learning is an individual activity, as well as a socially mediated one. Exactly what is learned depends on each students' prior knowledge, and the specific interaction that they have with the project and with the other students. For this reason, what each student ends up learning from a collaborative project will be different. In this sense there is no co-creation of knowledge.

Yet the artefact somehow represents the co-creation of knowledge. (Our co-created artefact from the text-chat last night is here ) How is this possible? In the same way that knowledge is distributed within society. We do not individually need to know everything – we each specialise, assuming that someone else can give us access to the information should we need it. So even if each individual student gets something different from the process, the end result is something that is greater than the sum of it's parts, something greater than what an individual student could create on their own. And for this reason it is a valuable learning experience.

Image 'create' from GFpeck on Flickr, Attribution - NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

Students as co-creators of knowledge by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.