Final Report - Unit1 - Activity1 - AB

This annotated bibliography aims to compile, refine and expand the annotated bibliography made in unit 1.
•The original Annotated Bibliography – Unit 1: Cooperative freedom

•BALKCOM, S. (1992); “Cooperative learning”. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/cooplear.html

This article from “Education Research CONSUMER GUIDE” defines Cooperative Learning as “a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject”. It also give us some examples of strategies that can be used: Group Investigations, STAD (Student Teams-Achievement Divisions) and Jigsaw II; and some examples of specific programs: Team Accelerated Instruction (TAI) in Mathematics, Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC), Success for All and Finding Out/Descubrimiento.

•Gokhale, A. (1995); “Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking”. Retrieved February 12, 2010, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html

This article describes a study that intends to examine the effectiveness of individual learning versus collaborative learning in enhancing drill-and-practice skills and critical-thinking skills.
It concludes that collaborative learning facilitates the development of critical thinking through discussion, clarification of ideas, and evaluation of others' ideas.
It’s very important to clarify the instructor's role, as a facilitator for learning and not just to transmit information. In order to develop and enhance students' ability to learn, the instructor must create and manage meaningful learning experiences and stimulating students' thinking through real world problems.


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Personal comments

I must confess that I had some difficulties on distinguish between the two concepts “Cooperative Learning” and “Collaborative Learning” and so my research focused in clarifying that.
Learning can be individual, collaborative or cooperative.
Although the individual learning provides individual flexibility, doesn´t permit to develop affinity to a learning community. The collaborative learning limits individual flexibility because it requires that students “sink or swim together” by participating in a learning community. The cooperative learning enables the affinity to a learning community and at the same time encourages individual flexibility. The cooperative learning get benefits from individual freedom and benefits from cooperation. The distance students need cooperation as much as individual freedom and by taking place in network and by having the web 2.0 tools it´s possible to collaborate, store, display the work done and allow to share, organize, add annotations and learn from and with others, as well as they can learn from and with us.