Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind

Kenneth Bruffee’s Collaborative Learning and the “Conversation of Mankind” attempts to say that knowledge is gained by working with peers. I’m sure this is a true statement, but when asking the question “does knowing require contact with another intellect?”, I’m not so sure. Sure, contact with a peer can help you gain knowledge, but I don’t think that human contact is required to gain knowledge. There are some types of knowledge that can only be gained via human interaction, but, for the most part, I feel that it is not needed to do so in gaining knowledge for school and other things. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like I work best when in a group, but I don’t think that is the only way to work. In fact, I’m sitting here in my room working on this blog alone. There’s no one around me, and I’d say I’m doing a pretty fine job.
I know people that can just sit in their room and read for 3-4 hours and have gained an insane amount of knowledge in that amount of time just by reading something and studying it. It’s not a far-fetched idea to say this, because so many people do it. You see people studying alone in the library every day, gaining knowledge and applying it to real-life situations. In the article, Bruffee talks about peer tutoring, where, instead of getting tutored by an elder, the student gets tutored by another student. This is a great way to work, and it is a great example of Collaborative Learning at work. By peer tutoring, both the tutor and the person being tutored can gain knowledge; not just the person being tutored. Not only can a tutor help the person being tutored, but the tutor can also learn from what he/she is evaluating and use that to make their own works of writing better.
While personally, I prefer collaborative learning to studying on my own, I don’t think that being alone restricts you from gaining knowledge having to do with education. Street smarts? Maybe. No, scratch that. Definitely. But for education purposes where you only need to know certain subjects? I don’t think it matters in the long run whether or not you’re working alone or with others to expand on the knowledge you have already.