Global Collaborative Projects
Frost still encrusts the tussock grass in the shade of the red gums. Mist lies along the
base of the rocky hills. Small groups of students work away on the regular tasks: turning
the compost heap, cleaning out the fowl house, cautiously checking the school bee hives.
Students in clouds of foggy breath are thinning the winter vegetables. A student is noting
the output from the computerized weather station.
A common first-session sight at a rural secondary school? Yes, but there is a difference.
These are students working collaboratively with students they will never meet, thousands
of kilometers and a cultural vastness away in West Africa. Through this semicommercial, organic agriculture project, techniques are shared, experiments are
conducted, failures noted and success celebrated. Both learn from each other and each
teaches its own community. The West African group has become known as the
“family survival unit” because, due to drought, the produce has become essential to
village life. Through computer communications and computer processing two so very
different groups of young people learn together and hold hands across continents and
oceans.
There is no frost on the casuarina and banyan-shaded beach of the Carpentaria Gulf
island far to the north. A warm breeze and a lapping sea accompany children gathering
shells and flotsam for their global project of collecting and describing marine island
environments. Descriptions, drawings and photos will later be posted to the school web
site.
Returning to school, they turn to work on mapping puzzles of central European and North
American lands sent by partner schools. They will tackle grids, compass points and
riddles, seeking to find treasure. Both they and the distant collaborating classes will give
hints and set tasks as they search each other’s landscape in a collaborative and
competitive quest.
From beachcombing cartographers and organic farmers we turn to a team of Grade Three
and Four aeronautical engineers in the hills of the metropolitan fringe. The international
challenge they have set for the best paper aeroplane involves them in planning and design
of aircraft, construction, testing, measuring, collating. They use email, word-processors,
spreadsheets. They build links with children in other lands; they author web pages to
celebrate their collective achievements.
As the winter evening falls five girls work together discussing the selection of student
prose and poetry from the hundreds of pieces contributed to a dedicated electronic
newsgroup. Three of the students are in a Victorian country school, two in a crowded
Pakistan city. The culmination of their year-long collaboration, the selection, formatting
and editing of a global anthology of student writing, is approaching. Having overseen the
reception of the writings, encouraged contributing writers to comment on each other’s
work they now hold almost daily electronic meetings of their editorial team.
Bob Carter: iEARN Australia
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In these diverse ways teachers and students take advantage of the opportunities
information and communication technologies (ICT) offer to their daily school lives.
Collaborative projects bring together two or more geographically-diverse groups of
students who work together on a theme or question or who contribute to a compilation of
materials on a topic. They use the full range of ICT, including newsgroups, email, web
pages, video-conferencing. Many projects also involve physical exchanges of student
work either as part of the process of the project or as a culmination of it.
Some collaborative projects engage a substantial number of groups in a fairly freeflowing interaction; some are more structured. While some projects have a planned life of
a limited duration, others are on-going with, perhaps, an annual calendar of project
stages.
Such projects eschew the "pen-pal" approach to the classroom use of ICT believing this
to have very limited benefits. Rather, they seek to involve students in discussions of
issues, production of materials, creative efforts and seek to engage students through
commitment to meaningful work with others.
The place of the computer in the classroom remains problematic or, at least, is a focus of
on-going re-examination for the reflective educator. What value and what role do
computers and their attendant facilities have in the education of young people? Do they
provide a handy, efficient way of enabling students to revise and develop their writing?
Do they provide access to hitherto unimagined information and opinion? Are they a
diversion and waster of time through students’ addiction to gaudy presentation, the
successful production of fancy software tricks? Has email simply made the note-aroundthe-classroom more efficient and less detectable?
Do we teach software technicalities? And, if so, do we do it in a context of broader
knowledge, analysis and synthesis? Do we teach web publishing in the SOSE class as
part of our teaching of Egyptian ancient culture? Or do we teach web publishing in an
ICT class and permit, encourage or require the production of a web document for
successful presentation of a student’s achievements in understanding the life of 3000year-ago Nile valley inhabitants? Are computers a diversion or are they the liberation
from a stultifying teacher-centered régime?
Despite the dilemmas and despite the unresolved (irresolvable?) questions, to drive the
computer and ICT from the classroom is, obviously, neither realistic nor a productive
response to the challenge. The simple reality of ICT’s dominance of social and industrial
life requires schools to involve themselves. This reality will no more stay outside the
classroom than will the latest episode of the television soap. And it would be, almost
undeniably, to discard the youngster along with the bubbles.
Other have, and will, define the conundrum better than I but the questions seems to be
whether we can make computers serve teachers’ pedagogical ambitions in all or some of
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its myriad dimensions. Will kids learn better the things we want them to learn? Will their
knowledge broaden and deepen? Will their skills in hypothesis, analysis and ability to
argue a case be more greatly developed? Will they be better equipped to solve a
problem? Will they, through the presence of ICT in their classrooms, become more
capable adults?
Collaborative project work perhaps provides one doorway to a classroom environment
where these questions are addressed. It potentially creates an ITC-affected ambience
which allies the potential of computers to the teacher’s ambition: through making ICT the
vehicle through which is engendered challenge and commitment and through which
students will seek accomplishment beyond what a teacher would otherwise draw out.
Collaborative projects involve students in some form of contractual arrangement with
another class or with groups of students in a number of schools, sometimes spread across
countries and continents. A commitment, often stronger than a teacher can directly
impose, is created. Students will, very quickly, know names, not only of schools and
classes but also of individual students in these partnering classes. They become aware of
the efforts and enthusiasms of these partners. A feeling of obligation arises. The teacher
does not demand the efforts required of them, they are demanded by the commitment
they have made to their fellow students, perhaps many thousands of kilometers distant.
The members of the class, moreover, share the commitment. It is not too strong to
suggest that the project creates an ethos of shared commitment, one that spurs on the
individual but also unites the class as a body.
Allied to this is the immersion of the students, as a group, in a project culture. Walking
through the classroom door, students so often are affected by a feeling of walking into the
project. They know what is expected; they feel pressure to tackle, advance or complete a
task, a task that is expected of them by their far-away colleagues. There is no guarantee
that the noise levels are any lower, or that scrambles for spots in the classroom are any
less chaotic; collaborative projects have yet to solve all the problems attendant on
gathering 25 adolescents or 20 Grade 1s in a confined space. But bring students with a
common purpose together, make that purpose one that satisfies a teacher’s lofty
aspirations, and sometimes it will all seem worthwhile, despite the incredibly persistent
ability of young humans to send adults to a staff room seeking solace and sustenance in
only 50 minutes.
Collaborative projects have the capacity to immerse students in novel environments. It is
one perhaps unique in education. What is in those other classrooms, in Karachi, in
Mombassa, on Long Island, NYC or on the windy coast of Patagonia is part of this
classroom on the red gum plains or Top End tropical coast. The values and voices, the
routines and the problems, the demands and the sometimes-unfulfilled promises walk
right in and take a seat among the bobbing heads of the Australian classroom. Teachers
far away become important. Children who, unbelievably, have never heard of Aussie
Rules affect the class dynamics. Time zones not ever before considered, seasons which
are out-of-kilter, weather, food, forms of transport and modes of accommodation hitherto
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unimagined become, if not exactly real and understood, at least sources of surprise and
conjecture. Stories, naturally told, of taking roses to the teacher on Teachers’ Day
astound. As do descriptions of the students mopping, dusting and scrubbing the school
for a day to allow the cleaners to attend Cleaners’ Picnic Day.
Students working in a collaborative project plan and execute their work for an audience.
This is a strong motivator. It is also one of the most powerful tools put in a teacher’s
hands. If the task is written: revision, correction, spelling, grammar become, not a
teacher’s irritating obsession, but legitimate and necessary when created for an audience
and for an audience which perhaps reads the English prose in their third or fourth
language. Writing for an audience such as this requires slang to be eliminated or, at least,
explained. Students are forced to reflect on things which they have always considered
normal, explain them, describe them and, in doing so, understand their uniqueness and
the way that they are creations of local custom and culture.
Schools across the world are so different, as different as are the environments in which
the students live. Attitudes to study, to teachers, to parents, to religion: so different and,
yet, so often, so strikingly familiar. All these surround the student throughout the
collaborative project. Just as importantly, the students are forced to be reflective about
their own environment. It is staggering in many instances how little students really know
about their surroundings. This is a lack of factual knowledge: the what, where, how
many. It is more fundamentally a relative absence of conceptual knowledge: the why, the
how. It is perhaps unsurprising but is significant. Relating a student’s study of
geography, science, history, values and culture in a meaningful way to her daily
experience is a challenge. No claims that collaborative projects have the magic key - but
the requirement made by a project’s commitment to foreign friends does, sometimes
powerfully, provide a powerful prod and rationale.
Collaborative project work generally leads to a concrete outcome. It may be the
collection of diaries, photos and souvenirs of a teddy bear exchange. Culture kits may be
prepared and sent through the mail. A web page of investigative and research findings
may be created by the individual classes or cooperatively. A hard copy booklet may be
the outcome. Art pieces, created around a philosophical, cultural or environmental theme
might be exchanged virtually or physically. The list has no limits: calendars, quilts made
of pieces sewn in a dozen different schools, art exhibitions, newspapers, anthologies.
Each is a physical manifestation of collaborative commitment of the students and
teachers who have contributed to it. It is something to be proud of, to show parents and
community, to showcase through newspapers and, literally or not, hold in the hand as a
validation of cooperative effort and a striving for achievement. It is, just incidentally, a
source of excitement and fun.
Collaborative project work offers the teacher rewards beyond the achievements of their
students. Whether through a network or through a one-to-one cooperation based on their
students’ exchange, teacher interaction is natural and to be expected. As with their
students, they enter a contractual commitment. But, in collaborative project work, this
cooperation often erupts unexpectedly, sometimes overwhelmingly, into friendship.
Bob Carter: iEARN Australia
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It may be with the teacher in central Asia who, in linking with your class, is using the
internet for the first time. She meets her students on Saturdays at the public-access
computer center for them to type their messages, scan and load images and await
response from this strange, unknown island south of the equator. It may be that the
partner teacher lives and teaches among the New York canyons; efficient, energetic,
perhaps a little brusque, he’s generous in his collaboration, forgiving of un-met deadlines
and is not too bad at all with advice of software tricks. Or perhaps the partner’s school is
in the shadow of the Hindu Kush. She overflows with ambitions and plans for her
students, shares them with you and flatteringly seeks your advice. You express your
fascination with this epicenter of history, promise to visit and … perhaps it just might
happen.
It is a common-place for these teacher-to-teacher relationships to go beyond the project
parameters. Real friendships do develop: some transitory, some enduring. It is
something quite special to talk regularly about teaching theory and strategies to a fellow
teacher, thousands of kilometers away across oceans and deserts, one with whom you
have shared hopes, work and success. And you might share school and family news,
holiday plans, recipes and perhaps a scandal or two. If nothing else the Australian teacher
might discover how to induce her students to bring her chocolates and roses on
International Teachers’ Day.
Collaborative project work is not without its challenges for teachers. Sometimes a
project will deliver less than was hoped. It can make organizational demands, if not more
burdensome, then at least different from those made by other curriculum delivery. And it
requires a commitment.
It is the powerful educative characteristics of collaborative projects and the way they
draw together almost seamlessly that make them powerful. They have a way of changing
lives.
There is a big world beyond the classroom walls. Why engage with it? Well … maybe
because, like Everest, it’s there.
Bob Carter, iEARN Australia
Bob Carter: iEARN Australia
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