I teach English composition, so my perspective might be a little bit different. If I found my students were writing to each other about their writing in some online venue I would be unambiguously thrilled. But here’s a question that I don’t believe any of you had raised. How would the situation change if the students collaborating were not all in the same class or section, if they did not share the same instructor, or even if they did not attend the same university?

Publishing tools like Facebook (and that’s how such things should likely be considered) make it possible for undergraduates to, in effect, maintain their own publications and venues. We may see transnational groups of undergraduates, all of whom are studying, say, biology, renaissance art history or Java programming, collaborating online. And I think this is probably a good thing, an autochthonous development of what is really a very scholarly kind of practice, namely collaborative enquiry.

I would understand if those in the sciences see this differently.

Discovery is done through trial and error and inductive reasoning. Riding a bike isn’t that different than walking. You are applying your ability to balance to a new situation. A lot of discoveries are made by applying old tools to new circumstances.

If I merely imitated my Dad’s performance, I could not have made that adjustment.

But we don’t merely imitate, we construct an internal model and we are perfectly capable of adapting learned behaviors to novel situations. I have a mental idea of my apartment that I confirm through my senses. I don’t even need to look for the dish soap, I know exactly where it is. So “get more dish soap” is a trivial problem. I do not know the world and I don’t perceive it directly. All I know are my ideas about the world and I can discuss those ideas just as easily over a telephone or the internet as I can in person. Learning takes place in the realm of ideas. How that happens, solving a hard problem alone or in collaboration with others, doesn’t seem to me to be that important as long as it takes place.

Nicely provocative question, Clay.

It made me smile to see people argue that rules is rules. Collaboration/conspiracy was rare in the past; but only because of lack of skilled and the difficulty of collaboration. Solitary exercised based learning made sense on that landscape. That landscape is over. That bubble has burst. The barriers have evaporated and students are highly practiced in collaboration now.

Sometimes rules become unnatural. For example, the road has a natural speed limit and a posted speed limit. If the road’s natural speed limit is 70 miles per hour posting and you post it 25 that undermines the legitimacy your authority.

In this scenario the university authorities have no idea, in-spite of their protests to the contrary, how much of the nature of the game has changed.

I’ve heard older university faculty complain about how their peers aren’t around. They travel. They collaborate with others across the globe. It undermines the tradition of a community of scholars.

The university was a solution to that group forming problem. If that was it’s core function, and the other stuff – teaching, qualification, collections, libraries, et. al. – were compliments then the end of homework as a solitary activity is the least of the institution’s problems.

ps. I love the link in #26

If this is true, how does humanity do anything new? How do you think the humanity ever learnt to ride a bike?

Humans have the added complication of language so much of this mirroring takes place in a sort of linguistic space but it’s still the same thing. Behaviors are observed, mirrored and then repeated until the appropriate neural circuit can be physically built.

Actually they aren’t. There is far more to learning than mirroring and repeating behaviours, as artificial intelligence researchers have found out. For example, take washing dishes – an activity most of us have learnt. Say we learn to wash dishes by watching our fathers wash dishes at home in the kitchen. But then, we grow up and leave home and must wash dishes for ourselves in a different kitchen. Most people who wash dishes are perfectly capable of washing dishes in a new foreign kitchen, but if we merely imitated dad’s performance we would not be. For example, in my childhood home, the dish detergent was kept on the windowsill in front of the sink. In my first flat, there was no such windowsill and we keep the dish detergent to the side of the sink. We also brought a different detergent. So Dad, to add detergent reached up and placed his right hand around the yellow bottle. I, to add detergent, had to reach to the left and place my hand around the green bottle. If I merely imitated my Dad’s performance, I could not have made that adjustment. But I did, without problem. Another example, some dishes require more scrubbing to get clean than others. And the dishes in a home change over time, and furthemore the dishes we have as adults are often different from the dishes our Dads washed at home. Yet people can wash new dishes.

To really learn to wash dishes requires that the learner forms a conceptual model whereby they can separate out the important ideas from site-specific details. That’s what makes artificial intelligence so difficult, it’s one thing to create a computer that copies behaviour, it’s another thing to make a computer that understands washing dishes and can apply the basic concepts in new situations. But most humans pick that up fine.

Making your own discoveries and having your own “Ah-ha!” moment is a very powerful motivation to keep on in a difficult subject. Are there fewer ah-ha moments in large study groups?

More broadly, my point is that I don’t think all learning is simply social – that mirror neurons are the whole story. I think we also learn by “doing” – by grappling with problems, even in solitude and even without an explicit model. Suppose someone learns through diligence to solve Rubik’s Cube: that have learned something through experimentation and analysis, no? They may have had the time for this as a consequence of being in solitary confinement.

Since even social learning requires attempts to perform rather than simply observe the target behavior I think it fair to say that this component of “doing” is almost always present. And that the attempt to balance the social aspects of learning and the aspects that come from making attempts at the problem directly is a lot of what is at stake in the problem at hand. Not that I expect any of what I just said is a particularly novel or likely controversial assertion; but that is what I mean.

This wasn’t just my opinion; most of the class agreed.

I cannot observe someone else’s experience but we can talk about it. “How was it for you? It was like this. Oh? For me it was sort of like that but a little more like this other thing” Really? I didn’t get that sense at all.” In talking we both construct a representation of our experience. Perhaps there is an actual circuit created that is then compared and edited? Maybe, maybe not but either way it’s a social activity. The music critic who has never talked to another critic or only with like minded friends isn’t much of a critic.

However, I don’t agree that “rules are rules”, precisely because the enforcement of rules affects their meaning. If Ryerson had somehow managed to enforce a ban on study groups regardless of medium, then one could argue that this was a neutral execution of rules.

Despite Dean Norrie’s intimation to this effect, however, no such real world enforcement existed. Indeed, study groups were so well integrated into the practice of Ryerson chemistry students that they had a standard, public place to hold their meetings, called The Dungeon, and the 146 online participants all congregated, publicly, in a Facebook also called The Dungeon.

The question here isn’t whether Ryerson is allowed punish students by selectively enforcing such a rule—that’s always an option. The question is why they were enforcing that rule for online behavior that all the students knew was publicly tolerated offline.

the problem here is graded homework that contributes to a final grade.

I always told my students that I wouldn’t collect or grade problem sets but that if they didn’t work on them seriously I could pretty well guarantee they’d do poorly on my exams. If they choose to ignore good advice, oh well.

This is factually incorrect. Humans, indeed all primates, do not learn individually. We learn by observing another perform an activity. Our mirror neurons fire and we imitate the other’s performance and repeat it until a corresponding circuit in our brains is created and we can perform the activity on our own.

Humans have the added complication of language so much of this mirroring takes place in a sort of linguistic space but it’s still the same thing. Behaviors are observed, mirrored and then repeated until the appropriate neural circuit can be physically built.

We call this learning. If you can’t perform the behavior, you haven’t learned it.