35. Cooperation and the Use of Technology

David W. Johnson
Roger T. Johnson

University of Minnesota

We live in an age that needs people who can work collaboratively designing, using, and maintaining the tools of technology. These tools pervade every aspect of our lives, from automatic teller machines, to bar codes on the things we buy, to copy machines, computers, and fax machines. Our society has moved from manufacturing-based work on which individuals generally competed or were independent from each other to information and technological-rich work on which individuals generally work in teams. Technology and teamwork will continuously play a larger role in our lives. Children, adolescents, and young adults have no choice but to develop and increase their technological and teamwork literacy. There is no better place for them to start than in school. Leaming in cooperative groups while utilizing the tools of technology should occur in all grade levels and subject areas.

Because the nature of technology used by a society influences what the society is and becomes, individuals who do not become technologically literate will be left behind. Influences of a technology include the nature of the medium, the way the medium extends human senses, and the type of cognitive processing required by the medium. Harold Adam Innis (1964, 1972) proposed that media biased towards lasting a long time, such as stone hieroglyphics, lead to small, stable societies because stone was difficult to edit and rewrite and was too heavy to distribute over great distances. In contrast, media biased toward traveling easily across distances, such as papyrus, enabled the Romans to build and run a large empire. Marshall McLuhan (1964) believed that the way the media technology balances the senses creates its own form of thinking and communicating and eventually alters the balance of human senses. He believed that oral communication makes hearing dominant and thought simultaneous and circular. Written communication makes sight dominant, and thought may be linear (one thing follows another), rational (cause and effect), and abstract. Electronic technology tends to recreate the village on a global scale through instantaneous and simultaneous communication in which physical distance between people becomes irrelevant. On a more negative note, Neil Postman (1985) expressed fears that our ability to reason with rigor and self-discipline is being eroded as fewer people read systematically and more people watch and listen to electronic media. Their thinking may become more reactive and impressionistic.

Given the pervasive and powerful effects media technologies can have on the nature of society and the thinking and communicating of its members, there can be little doubt that technology will increasingly be utilized in instructional situations. In the past, however, teachers and schools have been very slow in adopting new technologies and very quick in discontinuing its use (Cuban, 1986). Cuban documents a cyclic pattern in which: (a) the potential of a technology leads to fervent claims and promises by advocates, (b) its utility is demonstrated by academic research in a small set of classrooms rich with human and technical support, (c) teachers who have little or no resources adopt the technology and are frustrated by their failure to make it work, and (d) the use of the new technology gradually declines.

The failure of schools to adopt available instnictional technologies and to maintain (let alone continuously improve) their use may be at least in part due to two barriers: (a) the individual assumption underlying most hardware and software development and (b) the failure to utilize cooperation leaming as an inherent part of using instructional technologies. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the interdependence between instructional technologies and cooperation among students in using the technologies as an inherent part of classroom life. In order to understand how cooperative leaming may be used with instructional technologies, the nature of cooperative leaming needs to be defined, the theoretical foundations on which it is based need to be clarified, the research validating its use needs to be reviewed, distinctions between cooperative learning and other types of instructional groups needs to be made, and the basic elements that make cooperation work must be defined. At that point, the interrelationships between cooperative learning and technology-assisted instruction can be noted and their complementary strengths delineated. The future of technology-assisted cooperative learning can then be discussed.