Skills for networked collaboration

We live in an increasingly networked age. New developments in ICT are coming together with increased pressures to reduce travel and yet participate in a global economy to drive a trend towards new ways of working. In 2005, 36% of companies in the South West of England had at least one member of staff working at home . Quocirca's recent report, 'The Distributed Business Index', states, "70% of businesses say at least 25% of their staff are working remotely for at least part of the week. "

In both business and academia, organisations are increasingly involved in collaborative activities, working with people in different localities, often also in different time-zones and/or from different organisations, on a range of projects.

These new ways of working demand new skill-sets - the ability to evaluate and competently adopt new software tools, clarity of communications, [virtual] team working, systematic project management, management through output based measures, clarity of roles and responsibilities, integrated working etc.

Yet our schools are not systematically developing these skills; indeed, in many cases they are actively discourage them - school assessment regimes are based on individual achievement, whilst collaboration is often viewed as cheating or plagiarism; networked applications are viewed with suspicion and social networking is subject to near-paranoia. Students are learning these skills but they are often doing so in a haphazard way outside school, through the social networks, online gaming, VOIP and other communication tools that are frequently banned within the school environment. Whilst students may acquire many social networking and technical skills in this way, this ad hoc approach runs the considerable risk of widening the divide between those who have access and those who do not. In addition, the essentially haphazard nature of this approach means that young people are not acquiring the team-working and work management skills that are an essential component of distributed working.

Even welcome new developments, like the individual projects that are assessable at A/S level, are trapped in this mire. They will not be accepted by many universities because there is no guarantee that the work has been produced by the individual student. But why should it be? Any educationally involved parent knows that much of their child's homework or project work is the result of collaboration involving the student, parent, guardian, sibling, a range of online sources, friends etc - all can have an input into a piece of project work.

So why don't we accept this and welcome it? Why don't we provide the opportunity for students to do what people in the real world are increasingly doing - working as members of online project teams, focusing on real-world issues, using a mix of software tools to access a wide range of resources and applying their varied skills to identify, evaluate and implement possible solutions. Why are we not unlocking the enthusiasm and creative capabilities of our students and helping them to become productive, innovative contributors to UK plc?

These questions are not academic. In their recent report to NESTA/BERR, 'Innovation in Internet Content Services', the authors, Outsell, identified a number of significant barriers to the UK achieving its potential share of a massive global market; they made the following observation:-

"With schools now commendably producing a much more machine proficient workforce with far larger knowledge than ever before of the role and importance of the computer in society, there is now a need to push forward to a recognition of the proper use of networked collaboration. Such skills development would in turn help students in future employment in real or virtual workplaces. SIG members also observed that it is hard to envisage this barrier being overcome in an educational system where, all too often, heads and staff have been slow to recognise the need for change in the school's own use of network applications, collaboration and e- learning to secure greater productivity, better decision-making and more effective compliance with policy and regulation".

So, what solutions are there?

A brief consideration of the possible ways students may engage in collaborative working reveals a variety of models, dependent on the degree of localisation of work and the ways in which project teams are constituted

A significant amount of collaborative work takes place within schools, within classes or across classroom boundaries. As more schools exploit ICT to enable pupils to access resources from home, the boundaries between the purely local school environment and the wider local environment are slowly beginning to blur. Similarly the trend towards schools operating in Partnerships will lend itself to inter-school activity, increasing the opportunities for pupils to work on distributed projects.

However, the opportunity is not necessarily synonymous with activity and, to be truly effective, such projects would need to be augmented by activities that raise participants' awareness of the dynamics of team working - through a system of rotating group roles -avoiding the tendency to end up with one person doing the work and the rest who copy it.

There are established models that support inter-school collaborative work. One of these is iEARN (www.iearn.org/). This is an international network of non-Governmental Organisations which provides training, a secure infrastructure, teacher CPD and facilitation for online project working. The global network now works with up to 2m students per year in c140 countries. iEARN recently opened a UK office (www.iearnuk.com/) and its activities are embedded in school practice in Wales, where it is used as a medium to deliver key skills outcomes. However, it has very limited profile elsewhere in the UK.

In addition to its wide portfolio of online projects, iEARN also offers a learning circles approach. Through this it brings together students from, say, 5 schools to collaborate in a study of a particular topic, over a term. All students research all aspects of the topic and share their knowledge and understanding; each participating school group takes responsibility for authoring one component part (think 'chapter' in book terms) of the final, online report. Topics can be closely coupled to the curriculum and thus contribute to subject assessment outputs.

This approach lays the foundation for a further development which more closely represents the networking aspects of modern business. At this level online projects would involve teams comprised of individuals in different locations and from different schools. A learning circle, run with schools in the same locality, offers the opportunity to create friendship bonds between students from different schools and, as a result, form teams comprised of individuals from different institutions. These teams could undertake activities closely coupled to the curriculum or, alternatively, loosely coupled, cross-curricula themes. Activity could contribute to assessment outputs related to specific curriculum subjects and/or informal learning assessment frameworks could be used.

This provides a significant and engaging medium to promote STEM studies (science, technology, engineering and maths), supporting the findings of the Rocard Report , "A reversal of school science-teaching pedagogy from mainly deductive to inquiry-based methods provides the means to increase interest in science". For example, project teams could be asked to focus on a real-world problem, bringing to bear their creativity and innovation. For example, they could work on an issue proposed by a development charity such as Practical Action. (www.practicalaction.org/ ). Practical Action already operates The Sustainable Design Award for AS and A2 Level Design and Technology students. A distributed team-working approach offers not only the opportunity to apply a wider set of perspectives but also to engage participants from the country in which the problem is set.

Refinements on this approach would include
- Students using open software (as opposed to secure online facilities such as that offered by iEARN) with support to help them research, evaluate and adopt a range of software tools.
- Resources for teachers/students to help them introduce simple but systematic project management methodologies, rather than the somewhat haphazard approaches often taken towards individual project work in schools.
- The involvement of industrial mentors to support teams
- The involvement of ICT mentors to support the selection and adoption of software tools
- The development of assessment protocols that will enable students' participation in distributed projects to be accredited
- The launch of such projects through a competition model, sponsored by industry.