What I hope we can come to is a time where collaboration is actually taught, not simply a skill that appears exogenous of the curricula.

Sure, the ‘smart kids’ can figure out how to collaborate, just as they can teach themselves math or whatever. Collaboration is a very important academic skill, one that can’t be taught solely with books, it must be fostered.

Phase 1:

Orientation should begin with the student’s digital identity being mashed with an institution designed tagging taxonomy.

The student self tags and probably imports their Facebook tags as well.

The institution then recommends groups that have either a) have close matching group tags or b) have members with matching tags.

Orientation becomes a process of guided, individually customized introductions to people (through digital identity, then, importantly, real world) and groups.

These can be affinity groups, learning groups, activity groups, etc.

Phase 2:

The student’s activities are primarily managed online and placed in an aggregation interface.

(Think Facebook news feed, Basecamp RSS feed, right down to Twitter, piled into something like http://www.dandelife.com. Students add to their their activity record with reflective blogs.)

Phase 3:

These feeds leave searchable tags and a trail or digital “foot prints”. This gets aggregated and filtered by the institution’s software for the purpose of recommendation – sounding just like Amazon: People like you who took class Y and joined group B liked group x.

Students can drill down into recommendations to see the individuals whose “foot prints” they are following. They can make friends via digital identity, ask questions, recruit as mentor
(mentors get credit for teaching), etc.

Navigation is possible by individual at any time slice, i.e. freshman can see what cool seniors did as freshmen (think Facebook social time-line) or group, taxonomy, folksonomy or taskonomy.

School then, becomes guided, individualized, collaborative, bottom up and long-tailed.

Phase 4:

Data piles grow, recommendations become better, including classes first, then topic info streams (and open source curriculum bits).

Harvard shares recommendations methods and footprint tracks with Bainbridge Community College types and high schools. It all goes open source.

Oh and a fun side benefit: All this digital makes for much better assessment and a transparent quantitative grading system for grades that actually matter.

You might be interested in what Lisa Herrod is trying with her class at the Sydney Institute of TAFE. She describes her plan on her usability blog at Sitepoint

Basically, she gives them autonomy and independence with their own tumblelog but then allows sharing and discussion via mashing their feeds together in Jaiku

Very cool idea! I’m interested to see how it pans out

Obviously, things are much different with adult education, but when I was teaching 12-16 year olds, I definitely found this model of collaboration to be the best method of helping the students learn. Like Rosalind’s mother, I found it made for a very noisy classroom, but you have to learn to let go of that

Kids would share their knowledge with each other freely. It’s good for their self-esteem, their socialisation and their communication. It also makes teaching much easier and faster ;)