After reading the unit 1 assigned chapter from the Jonassen text, I was struck by a passage noted early in the chapter. When Jonassen breaks down the attributes that promote meaningful learning and goes into detail about Cooperative/Collaborative work, he writes, "In the everyday world, humans naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks. Then why do educators insist that learners work independently so much of the time?"
I thought about this for a long time and then thought about all the times I've asked students in my class to work "independently" on a project or assigned task. I thought I needed to this as often as I have been to get a clear picture of what they understand and how, or if, they are progressing, but as I reviewed the chapter again it mentions, "Humans naturally work together in learning and knowledge-building communities, exploiting each others' skills and appropriating each other's knowledge." (Jonassen pg.5 ) Today, I came in and gave my kids time to work together to complete assigned work throughout the day and I found that their collaborating could create be a whole new level of learning. They instinctively do seek each other out to help in areas where they need support. They also learned new things and questioned each other or interacted to bring up interesting talking points to expand on as a class.