Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 69

Internet Learning Volume 3 Number 2 - Fall 2014
Integrating Global Collaboration
Zhenlin Gao & Tom Green
Introduction
In the spring of 2011 I found myself
lecturing at a number of universities
throughout Southern and Central China.
The topic was the rise of mobile technologies
and how we, as teachers, need to learn
how to teach the subject and how, as students,
they need to look at the mobile space
as an emerging medium. As is so common
with these visits, I had the pleasure of meeting
with the Deans and faculty of the Media
Schools and a common topic of conversation
was how our institutions could work together.
Being a faculty member of the School of
Media Studies and Information Technology
at Humber College in Toronto, putting this
sort of thing in place was not in the cards
and my standard response to the question
was, ”This sort of thing is way above my pay
grade.” That changed, rather quickly when
I met Wang Xiaojie, Dean of the School of
Animation at Shenzhen Polytechnic (SZPT).
When he suggested the usual cooperation
and I deflected the question, he
made it quite clear he understood my position
and that I should put my Dean in touch
with him. Then I told him, as the meeting
concluded, “ Maybe we could do something
with our two groups of students.” That evening
one of his faculty members- Zhenlin
Gao, hereafter known as Jerry, contacted me
and told me Dean Wang thought that our
students working together was a great idea
and for Jerry to make it happen.
It was the start of one of the most
fascinating student-centric educational experiences
Jerry and I have shared.
Planning
You just don’t pull together students on
opposite sides of the planet together
and tell them to go create something.
Jerry and I spent a good six months considering
how this would work.
The underlying premise was: Our
students will be entering a global collaborative
work environment upon graduation.
They will be working with people who live
across the street, across the country and
even across the globe. This project will, in
a controlled manner, provide our students
with that experience.
This premise actually was validated
2 years later by a commentary by David Helf
and in the Chronicle for Higher Education
when he asked, essentially, the same question
we asked: “The brains of today’s undergraduates—a
product of a million years of
hominid evolution—are instinctively collaborative,
innately cooperative, and structurally
wired for small-group interaction mediated
by language and an awareness of the
intentionality of others. What might happen
if we structured our educational system to
take advantage of these natural attributes?”
We were also encouraged to see collaboration
appear in the 2014 NMC Horizon
Report: Higher Education Edition. One of the
6 key trends identified was the emergence of
Collaborative Learning. In many respects
this project reinforces the observation made
that “universities are experimenting with
policies that allow for more freedom in interactions
between students working on
projects and assessments.”
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