Content & Collaboration in the Library Classroom

What is content? How do you define that within your classroom?

To me content is what my students make it. Information is what I present, but it does not become content until the make connections with the information. It becomes content when they can use it in a meaningful way, connect it to everyday life, share it with others, and use it to inform their interactions and decisions.

Then what is collaboration?

To me, collaboration can be defined as any interaction where a student must work together with another person or with technology to create something. A collaboration can occur when a student interacts with a peer, with a teacher, with a parent, or with a computer program.

What happens when we use collaboration in our classroom?

In short, we help create useful content! Collaboration is essential for our students. They need to learn how to use technology to aid their collaborative efforts because their future will depend on it. They future academic and career paths with, in all likelihood, require some sort of technological collaboration, be it just email interactions, creating presentations, displaying documents, etc. Students need to learn the skills to collaborate effectively using technolgy and as teachers, we hold the key to facilitating this.

We need to allow students the time and freedom to explore technology platforms effectively and learn to use them to their highest collaborative potential. We can talk until we are blue int he face about how wikis and blogs can help our students interact, research, write, and share ideas, but unless we allow them to really experiment with the platform we are not allowing them to truly collaborate and in essence, to create content.