| Beschreibung: |
Education does not only need to foster and support the acquisition of information and knowledge, but should alsotrain higher-order skills which are necessary to engage with social and technological change and contribute to life-long-learning. Since learning is a participatory, social process, one of the most important, but rather complex higher-order skillsis the ability to participate in a constructive way within communities. Hence, in our fast changing society with highlydiversified life trajectories and a shortening half-life of knowledge and skills, interacting with people and improvingcompetence with the help of peers and experts is an increasingly important asset. However, we still lack knowledge on howto collaborate successfully, respectively, on how to lay the ground for beneficial collaborations. Obviously, this is a barrier touse the full potential of social media. Indeed, the expansion of social media tools has created massive opportunities for thesector of higher education, in particular for interaction and collaboration. Even though most students are familiar with socialmedia, they do not always use the collaborative potential of social software spontaneously for educational purposes. On theone hand, students have not yet experienced successful collaboration in an educational context. On the other hand, socialdilemmas hinder prosperous collaboration. The objective of this paper is to highlight how social barriers to collaboration canbe tackled with the concept of Win For All. The focus is in particular on one fundamental barrier for a successful collaboration:social dilemmas. A social dilemma is a situation in which a group of N-persons (N >= 2) has to choose between maximizingselfish interests and maximizing collective interests. Problems arise when something is beneficial for the individual butdetrimental for the group and vice versa. Thus, processes of learning together might be negatively influenced, for instance,through free-riding or social loafing. The concept of Win For All (or: winn), which was developed by the author, might be anapproach to overcome the fundamental tension between the individual and the group by harmonizing various sets ofinterest. In a Win For All-constellation, all n participants regard the benefits of all other participants as an essential elementfor their own benefit. For learning purposes, Win For All implies that each learner is not only responsible for his/her ownlearning progress and success – a situation which is normally forced by the educational systems in western societies -, butshould also support his/her colleagues’ learning progress and success as well as the learning progress and success of the classor the group as a whole. Benefits for all are the result. Single group members as well as the group in its entirety shall be ableto optimally learn, to develop their performance potential and to act responsibly. Thus, Win For All can be regarded as anall-purpose pattern of thought for group processes with the aim to optimally balance individual and group needs. The papershows how Win For All can contribute as a theoretical and practical foundation within educational contexts to fostersuccessful collaboration with social media. |