The paper provides a collaborative information seeking (CIS) learning task and definitions and descriptions for CIS, along with studies/examples. The authors examine collaborative, exploratory learning as a well-researched and engaging way for students to learn.
Information seeking and collaboration are discussed in some detail as important learning methods used by educators at all levels, from kindergarten to graduate courses. The authors include Prieto et al.’s definition of orchestration [1] along with Shah’s rationale for collaboration [2]. Prieto et al.’s definition is provided along with descriptions of the characterizing aspects of orchestration, including design, management, awareness, adaptation, and the roles of the teacher and other actors.
In education, learning models are often analyzed for efficacy and best practice/use. This paper examines one model that includes CIS and defines the concept of orchestration. The model and study is outlined in some detail. The study took place at the University of Maastricht, a highly ranked, competitive university; it was conducted in English and included upper-division students in their final year of undergraduate studies.
The paper summarizes research, theory, and experiments done in the field, including the orchestration of a CIS activity at the University of Maastricht, conducted by the authors. The authors describe the research, the orchestration of the activity, the questions involved, and data regarding student responses to the activity. They include their assessment and interpretation of the data, that is, the students found the collaborative task to be positive overall.
The ideology behind collaborative work has a lot of educational merit. With 20 years of educational practice, it is evident to me that the structure of a CIS activity is highly collaborative, engaging, and requires high levels of research skill and analysis. The orchestration of the event is certainly broken down into the sum of its parts. The paper is lengthy for the average educator and contains more research than most educators would find necessary. However, for the research minded, this paper does nicely summarize previous work and breaks the process down clearly into bite-sized pieces. It is quite detailed. The paper could be nicely summarized for an article in a more popular education publication for teachers or college instructors/professors. It may need to be tied into more traditional educational pedagogy and terminology to be more digestible to a larger audience. It could be useful for future researchers. It is my opinion that the authors felt that student satisfaction was slightly higher than the presented data actually indicated. It would be more realistic to say that the results as described indicated moderate levels of satisfaction versus high levels. Perhaps this will lead a future researcher to further develop varied orchestrations or iterations of a CIS with different populations/age groups, to see if the results differ significantly.
Overall, this research sows the seeds for future research and offers tangible ideas that could be translated for publication in more accessible professional magazines. It would be wonderful to make it more accessible to a larger audience of educators through the various organizations, associations, and trade magazines/publications available.
