Digital Collaboration

Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

What is it?

There’s group work and then there’s collaboration. Group work is the distribution of a predetermined task to more than one set of hands. Think ants building an ant hill, a law school study group divvying up chapters for review, or the team in the kitchen of a bustling restaurant cranking out the evening’s menu. Group work thrives on compartmentalization and predictability—each team member pulling their weight equally and consistently—which is why kids tend to hate it: rarely does every kid pull their weight equally and consistently. But, at its best, group work is efficient.

Collaboration, by contrast, is a challenge given to more than one brain. Think jazz musicians, the teams behind the COVID vaccines, or the writer, director, and set and costume designers of a movie. Collaboration thrives on diversity—each team member mutually dependent upon the unique perspective and skills of the others—which is why kids, after one real collaboration, tend to love it: their uniqueness is what matters. At its best, collaboration breeds new ideas and changes the world.

Digital tools make collaboration easy and fruitful. Unbound by constraints of space and time, students can work together whenever they want, wherever they are. Digital tools also help make assessing collaborations easier, as contributions are often user-attributed and time-stamped, providing a clearer sense of who did what when and allowing teachers to assess process as well as (or instead of) product.

Why do K-12 educators care?

While there are a slew of benefits to effective digital collaboration, educators often include these among the top:

1. Digital collaboration can be more equitable. Because digital collaboration can happen any time from nearly anywhere, many of the barriers of in-person collaboration are removed. Collaborators don’t have to live near each other, have aligning schedules, or use the same method of contribution. (For example, a student in a noisy household can participate in a real-time Zoom or Meet collaboration by using the chat.)
2. Digital collaboration is now truly a real-life skill. While digital collaboration has been on the rise since the turn of the 21st century, the pandemic radically increased its value in schools and businesses. In fact, famed management consulting firm McKinsey and Company cited digital collaboration as the greatest tech change the pandemic caused in businesses, and the second most likely one to stick beyond the pandemic.
3. Digital collaboration provides even more opportunities to achieve the benefits of collaboration. K-12 teachers love effective collaboration because it promotes social learning, feedback and revision, self-advocacy, executive function, and valuing diversity. Digital collaboration can leverage temporal and spatial positions to add even more richness. For example, a lab partnership gathering weather observations benefits from both the early riser and the night owl, and a group investigating elections benefits from a team members whose family members live in different districts, states, or even countries. Students reluctant to speak in person have myriad ways to contribute, and students who often take more than their share of work or air time can be curbed by timestamps, roles, and collaborator’s agreements.

What can it look like in the classroom?

Simple Collaborative Annotations

Here, 7th-grade students investigate the complex language of the United States’ Constitution. They are asked to visit a shared team Google Doc (4 - 6 students per group) at least three times during the course of a week, offering any of five types of contributions: providing definitions, asking analytical questions, replying to a peer’s question, connecting to current events or pop culture, or offering insights or other connections. In other words, they annotate digitally and collaboratively over time. Not surprisingly, the students went well beyond the requirements.

What should I be careful about?

Digital collaboration is most equitable when the tools for the collaboration are school-provided. Sticking to school tablets or laptops and school-provided software (such as Google accounts or an LMS) or free software (such as hypothes.is) keeps inequities of who’s-got-what-cool-tech out of group work. Be proactive or have a ready response to “Can I use my [high end equipment or software]?” (One answer may be, “Part of this exploration is to learn how to maximize [school provided software]” or “I’d like every group to use the same tools so that I can keep my grading criteria the same for each group.”)

Resist the temptation to make assumptions about timestamps. When students are given freedom to work on their own schedules, we have to resist jumping to conclusions. A contribution at 11:45pm may indeed mean that a student has procrastinated or stayed up too late. But it may also mean that the student lent her laptop to a younger sibling or that she has an after-school job or an older relative to care for or simply that she got inspired late at night. Like we always do, we can look for greater patterns if we’re concerned (such as exhaustion during the day) and approach the student in a spirit of inquiry and support if we’re worried.

Scaffold collaboration by using skill sets, defined roles, and collaborator’s agreements. While kids are collaborative by nature, they still need guidance on how to collaborate in an academic context where those collaborations are assessed and, therefore, are higher stakes. For quick analytical assignments, setting clear parameters for contributions (see “Got 5 minutes?” below) may be enough to spark exciting results.

For larger collaborations, such as curating a digital exhibit on Japan’s Edo Period, creating a research-based awareness campaign for ways to reduce waste, or crafting a multi-voice, multimedia reading of Jayson Reynolds’ Look Both Ways, you’ll want to empower your student groups to solve their own problems. Using these four approaches will not only help the students truly collaborate, but they’ll save you headaches as well:

• Start by having students share skill and interest sets—either on index cards posted on a bulletin board, post-its on a digital Jamboard, or discussion posts in an LMS. By identifying in advance what each student brings to the table or wants to try, skill and interest sets are a great way to build teams and promote buy-in.
• Have students define clear and equal roles. For an exhibit on Japan, one student may be the content director and project manager, another the designer and technician, and another the writer and editor. (Students can offer to take a second role, assisting a peer to learn a skill. For example, the content director may want to learn how the designer/technician creates the product.)
• Once teams are formed, they can create an estimated timeline and process. This document will not only save them time and help them keep on schedule, but it will improve their executive functioning, as they imagine what “getting done” looks like. (For an extra dose of metacognition, have them reflect on the timeline after the project to see where they over-, under-, or perfectly estimated the process.)
• Perhaps most importantly, teams should also create collaborators’ agreements, identifying their group communication preferences and strategies for what they’ll do (before reaching out to you) if someone is struggling or a deadline gets missed. (Geoffrey Rockwell, Associate Professor of Humanities Computing at McMaster University, offers helpful prompts for collaborators agreements.) This practice gives students a transferable skill they can take to all collaborations, in school and out.

How can I try it?

Got 5 minutes?

Try a collaboration that requires minimal set up and some structure. Pop next week’s reading into a Google doc for each team. Prompt students to visit their group’s document two different days within the week, adding three comments of a variety of types such as asking questions, connecting to current or historical events or pop culture, defining words in peer-friendly terms, offering insights, or responding to others. Comment here if you’re not amazed by their insights. (Better yet, comment here if you are!) Teams can browse each other’s documents to gain even more insights.

Got a whole class period?

Have students create collaborator profiles on a shared Google Doc or Jamboard, identifying areas of expertise, personal interests, and even skills they’d like to develop. In your next collaborative project, use the profiles to build student teams—a starting point for identifying responsibilities. The document may also give you and the kids ideas for possible collaborations you hadn’t even planned on.

A whole unit or course

If you plan to dedicate weeks to a collaborative project—perhaps making multi-voiced audiobooks of a public domain book like Little Women for LibriVox (thereby creating an OER) or creating digital presentations on fractions in real-life situations—take a class period for groups to make collaborator’s agreements. Then, take time throughout the project to debrief explicitly on process and adherence to that agreement. Whether students assess themselves or you are the ultimate arbiter of the grade, all of the projects will be better for this proactive step. 

Where can I learn more?

In five minutes, you can get some more helpful pointers from Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation.

With a longer investment, you can take a look at research supporting CSCL: Computer Supported Collaborative Science.

For a synchronous digital collaboration experience, consider Amherst College’s use of Zoom’s annotation tools to foster collaboration.

Want an inspiring reminder of what many different minds can do with digital access to the same problem? Check out this TEDMed talk about one man’s pursuit of a crowd-sourced cure for his brain cancer.