So you're part of a group. Congratulations. Now what? What is your role? Do you want one? Maybe you're shy or not the type that works well with others. I was intrigued by the video in class showing students in group settings all working on their projects. The conventional wisdom was, everyone seemed to be contributing and perhaps the kid or kids that did not contribute as much, created or gave the presentation. It didn't really make sense to me that the person that contributes least delivers the findings for the rest of the group. But OK. I guess since it's the last of the tasks and the person who has "contributed the least" should do something. But it got me thinking about the individual in the group and the pros and cons of the group dynamic. How can we adequately assess the individuals contribution?
Using our small class setting as an example, when a group gets started, it's somewhat chaotic. People getting to know each other for the first time maybe. Then the discussion begins to build around the topic and ideas begin to unfurl. People adding idea on top of idea until the original idea started by one person, now morps into something different. Contribution can be as simple as one word spoken by a person, perhaps the person that contributed the "least". It also could have been that one word that changed the course of the entire project and led to success or failure, but the contribution was no less significant.
Clay Shirky demonstrates this well in his Ted speech about Institutions vs. Collaboration. He uses Flickr as an example to show how "mind tools" level the playing field and allow collaborative contribution to thrive. In his example, one person can contribute many photos to a subject and another can contribute one photo, but perhaps the one photo by the person who contributed "the least" is the photo you want.
He then goes on to eviscerate Steve Ballmer of Microsoft who is adamantly opposed to the idea of open source programming. How can thousands of people contributing to a program who do only one thing or add one patch be successful in achieving an end result. Poking fun a bit at Ballmer, he says,
(Ballmer talking)"we hired this programmer he came in and drank all our Cokes and played Foosball all day and all he contributed was one idea". To which Clay responds, "what if (the one idea) was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit of which Windows has, if not some, several."
This illustrates for me as a teacher, the importance of having my students work in groups. In the past I have not worked in group settings. I didn't have any experience with group teaching or learning. Having experienced it in class now, I am more inclined in the future to have my students work this way. They can effectively learn more and experience more working together then by themselves, isolated on a problem.
The world is moving in the direction of collaboration. So it is increasingly important that students be exposed to these learning environments. My students in a lot of ways are ahead of their teachers. They are already using programs to collaborate whether it be for social, educational, personal, etc. reasons. So again I feel we are behind the times in the learning environment of the school. We are seeing, as Clay says,
"a massive readjustment and since we can see it in advance and know that it is coming, we might as well get good at it". (group learning and collaboration)
This is the essence of social value. The contribution of one person as small as it is, to perhaps never to be seen from again, can make all the difference in the world.
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