Review by: Jenert, Tobias (2009-01-12)

The article addresses the introduction of group and team work (the terms are used synonym-ously in the text) settings as well as supporting collaborative technology in higher education (HE). The main goals are to (1) gain deeper insight into which group work and technological skills are demanded by employers, (2) what HE students' attitudes towards group work and collaborative technologies are, and (3) to identify barriers of and needs for a successful im-plementation of group work and collaborative technologies in HE.

To arrive at these goals, the paper reports findings from an empirical study addressing all three fields of interest.

In a so-called "industry survey" 20 human resource managers (HRM) from various organiza-tions in Scotland were asked about the importance and practice of teamwork in their organiza-tion. The results showed that while team work as a general concept or mode of working is very widespread, only few use an explicit framework conceptualizing what teamwork exactly is and what its values are. Still, teamwork is regarded essential and graduates are expected to be trained in team working. When it comes to "team working technology" such as groupware, most HRM referred to e-mail and intranets as technologies used to support teamwork. Again, even if there was no clear conception about what group working technology could be and its immediate use within one's organization was doubted, it was expected of HE graduates to be familiar with such technology. Summarized, the "industry survey" shows that skills in team-work as well as collaborative technology are regarded important as educational objectives in HE, even if concepts of what successful group work is and how it should be carried out in working environments seem rather unclear.

Second, a case study was carried out, using questionnaires and interviews to investigate into HE students' attitudes towards group work in general and collaborative technologies in partic-ular. Regarding group work in general, the attitudes were rather positive and the need for so-cial skills related to collaboration widely acknowledged (especially with regard to employers' demands). However, individual group work processes were reported to be more or less un-structured and accidental as students had neither received special training nor any other in-formation about how to professionally work together in groups. Accordingly, students re-ported problems in organizing their actual working together and seeing the immediate merit of group work. With collaborative technology the picture looked roughly the same: Most of the students saw some sense in the use of groupware. When actually working together during the case study, however, most of them did not use the provided tools (electronic blackboard, vir-tual classroom). The reasons were that they either had no need for it or they did not feel too comfortable using the tools.

From these findings, the author draws four conclusions that can be summarized in two main points: First, both in the "industry" as well as in educational settings there seems to be a lot of rhetoric about the value and need for team and group work while there is a lack in concepts about what the necessary framing conditions and skills for successful group work as well as supporting technology are. Second, as a consequence of this lack of clarity, both in work as in educational settings the added value of as well as professional strategies for group work and the use of collaborative technology remain blurry.

Concluding, the article provides several interesting insights: First, the idea to first look at the needs for group work and collaborative technology in the industry appears to be a worthwhile approach. Second, the paper points to the fact that while there are a lot of great expectations about the values of collaboration, these are more to be attributed to rhetoric than to actual ex-perience. And third, it points to the need for strategies that (a) explicate what purpose collabo-ration shall serve in a given context and (b) foster skills that are needed to fulfill this purpose.

A major weakness of the article, however, is the lack of references to current theoretical as well as empirical work on collaboration in educational settings. For example the literature on scripting collaborative learning provides a vast pool of concepts on how collaborative settings can be designed to address the problems mentioned in the article. This may also be the reason why the recommendations given do not appear too innovative from an educational point of view.