Meaningful learning is an excellent way for creating collective intelligence. In this update I will explain why, give some examples and make a connection to a MOOC.

What is meaningful learning?

To explain this, let’s start with a short youtube movie:

So, meaningful learning has five characteristics. It is active learning, it’s constructive, intentional, authentic and cooperative. You can look into this prezi presentation to find  a more specific explanation for these five characteristics. Most important, meaningful learning is learning that needs students to be active, to really look into the topic, and they usually work with assignments  that has to do with ‘the real world’. By working together they learn to be part of a team, and they will probably discover that there is more than one solution.

Working together, just do it?

There are a few conditions you need to keep in mind. Students working in a group of 4 is considered ideal, but it depends of the task.  Also, I do remember my daughter complaining about teammembers not doing their part of the job. It is important that teachers form teams that are balanced, considering different capabilities and attitude. Third, teams should  not remain the same the whole school year, because in real life this isn’t the case too (Vallori, A. B., 2014).

Benefits of working together - collective intelligence

As said in the Coursera video’s by Dr Cope and Dr Kalantzis, collaborative performance build up a sense of community. By doing the assignment together, students experience commitment to each other, the students wants to contribute to the product and they are really proud when they produce something that can be (re)used! The assignments presented by the students are often showing more dept of knowledge, they are able to present something together at a higher standard, than when they had to do it just by themself (collective intelligence). A funny example you can see in this video about ants. Just scroll a little, and you will see it. Learning is really a social activity, together you can accomplish more.

Example

One of the examples of meaningful learning I want to use is the school of my daughter in the Netherlands. Her school is called Heerbeeck, located in Best, near Eindhoven, and they are part of the brainport area. Although this area is a lot smaller comparing to the Silicon Valley, you can compare it in a way. There is a lot of technology development in that area, and there are many companies supplying in this process. These specific developments acquires students with special skills. To teach students these skills, and to let them see what kind of work possibilities there are in ‘real life’ and get them interested, different companies and schools decided to go together in this process, under the name brainportdevelopment. Students deal with real assignments from companies, working together to find a solutions, present their solutions to the company and find out which solution would be used and why. So, their assignments are active, intentional, constructive, authentic and cooperative. Four times a year, she has a so called Heerbeeck-week, where they start with a particular topic, get an introduction, get an real assignement and work together in groups for a whole week. One of the projects my daughter had was a water project. They first visit a special location, Neeltje Jans, part of the Delta Works, and then had to make an island, as you can read in textbox 1.

Textbox 1 Example of an assignment

They also had a project about sound where they got in touch with a musician, and then they had to design a new music instrument, and a project about making a new design of the railway area, a plan they could present to the architect.  

Looking to the excitement of my daughter, I think this kind of learning is really motivating.

Meaningful learning and MOOC

So, these projects are really great, creating lots of learning pleasure. But, they only happens four times a year, and then the curriculum continues as usually. A MOOC creates possibilities to insert more of these projects. Students can communicate all the time, showing ideas to each other, creating together and present their projects for example in a video, so the project is no longer depending on the presence of a particular person (like an architect, a musician etc.). Implementing a MOOC in the school would give much more possibilities for meaningful projects and deeper knowledge.   

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2015). Learning and new media. In D. Scott and E. Hargreaves (Eds.), The sage handbook of learning (pp. 373-387). Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

Vallori, A. B. (2014). Meaningful Learning in Practice. Journal of Education and Human Development, 3(4), pp. 199-209 (internetlink)