Derrick L. Cogburn: "Globally-Distributed Collaborative Learning and Human Capacity Development in the Knowledge Economy"

Citation: 

Cogburn, D.L. (in press). “Globally-Distributed Collaborative Learning and Human Capacity Development in the Knowledge Economy.” In Mulenga, D. ed., Globalization and Lifelong Education: Critical Perspectives. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers

Abstract: 

This chapter presents initial findings from a pilot investigation, comprising three six-month field studies, examining geographically distributed collaborative learning between students and faculty in developed and developing countries. The investigation focuses on an interdisciplinary seminar involving graduate students at two universities in the United States and two in South Africa. Each semester, students were randomly assigned to one of five global virtual teams, with no more than two team members from each university. A collaboratory infrastructure was developed for the seminar using a suite of commercially available web-based tools, and included a virtual seminar room, a collaborative file management system; and archived e-mail discussion lists. Over the course of a semester, each team was given a series of tasks (ranging from simple to theoretically complex) that required global collaboration to complete. Data for the study are drawn from surveys of seminar participants, e-mail archives, logs of software usage, and observer-observation. Key findings include the following: (1) while 61% of the participants had a preference for the physical presence of the professor during the lecture, 22% of participants had a preference for the lecture without the physical presence of the professor; (2) a majority of students (73%) enjoyed most or all of the lectures; (3) a majority of students (71%) would register for this or another seminar taught in this manner; (4) a majority of students (76%) saw their global virtual team as a learning community, with nearly all of the students (91%) seeing value in the pedagogical model used in the seminar.

Keywords:

Globalization, Collaboratories, Collaborative Learning, Global Virtual Teams, US and South African Cooperation, Distributed Knowledge Work, Global Information Infrastructure, Global Information Society.