The Bigger Picture: Understanding Web-Based School Collaboration

The past two chapters reviewed a range of evidence from the case study projects—highlighting and illustrating the many issues underpinning schools’ engagement with the eTwinning initiative and revealing how a range of overlapping and interrelated factors can determine educational collaboration. In this chapter, a comparative approach to data analysis is taken that allows us to compare the data collected from the four diverse cases in terms of the study’s research questions. Given the main objective of this study to investigate the similarities and differences underpinning digital technology use for school collaboration across a range of classrooms, there is now a need to compare the four previously discussed cases. At the start of this book it was highlighted how the collaborative and other teaching and learning opportunities afforded by digital technologies were seen to resonate with the collaborative aims and flexible nature of the eTwinning initiative. This chapter will go on to bring together, summarize, and compare the findings from all four case studies—exploring how digital technologies were appropriated in practice and presenting the types of school norms and modes that did not fit comfortably with these perceived opportunities. This will be achieved by engaging in a comparative analysis and will be structured around themes rather than individual participants or projects— highlighting a number of underpinning issues that recur throughout the data while answering the four research questions of this study established in chapter 2: ● How can the use of digital technologies create opportunities for online student interaction and collaboration? ● How do these opportunities “fit” into existing school practices? ● What are the drivers and inhibitors for engaging with a collaborative project for teachers? ● What are the drivers and inhibitors for engaging with a collaborative project for students?