Jo Blogs: Working With Wikis - EDED20491 Week 2 Post #4

Engagement Activity 4: Blog reflection on wiki activity

This (essential) activity is to post a reflection about the learning that was facilitated in the Mobile Phones wiki, analysing it within the context of the learning theories you are starting to consolidate. Is this forum reflective of Behaviourism, constructivism, cognitivism, connectivism? One, or all of the above? What are the characteristics of the wiki design that lead you to that understanding? Reflect on your own personal participation in the wiki. What are the benefits, issues, drawbacks of participating in a wiki like this? How would it contribute to the learning of your students? How did the scaffold support the collection of a range of perspectives? Whilst you may have learned more about mobile phones in the classroom, the purpose is more about the design and participation experience in this activity. This reflection is compulsory, it forms the first part of Assessment task 2.

I have chosen to use the PMI tool to frame my reflections because the PMI tool provides a simple technique to examine the task using three different perspectives. The reflections on use of the wiki will be broken up into two sub-sections: analysis of the task of using the wiki; and analysis of using De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to scaffold the group reflections on the task. The third and final sub-section is a personal reflection on the task and how wikis and De Bono's Six Thinking Hats could be used to inform my teaching practice.

Critical reflection on the task of using a wiki

Pluses	Minuses	Interesting/Implications
Free tools are available	Requires clear instructions so as not to confuse the students.	Incorporation of many multi media forms ie,links to web pages, other wikis, blogs, etc Limited only by your imagination
Easy to create and edit	If no controls in place have to educate students about what is an inappropriate post	Informal learning is happening when they collaborate with the colleagues and learning to use technology
Students can work together on a task or to create a resource	Material can be deleted or accidentally overwritten. Retrieval is possible but difficult.
Supports collaboration as students can edit others contributions to improve them	Teacher needs to scaffold the tasks so that the students are guided in their learning
Available for others to comment (external to the group)	To keep the level of interest in the wiki, authors need to provide feedback on comments regularly.
Ability to add multimedia to the wiki	Teacher needs to ensure that every student gets an opportunity to contribute. Very easy to hide when the task is online.
Students could set up new pages in the wiki on topics that interest them	The editor in the wiki was 'cludgy' and not very easy to use

Critical reflection on the use of De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to scaffold group reflections on a task.

Pluses	Minuses	Interesting/Implications
A simple but powerful framework to ensure that the students critically evaluated the technology (mobile phones)	Requires clear instructions so as not to confuse the students.	Forced me to move outside of my normal (entrenched) thinking style.
Prompts each student to look at the technology from multiple perspectives	Very time-consuming if every student is to provide their 6 perspectives on the tool	More rounded view of the mobile phone in the classroom because of the number of people each writing from their own perspective
Students were able to build on and reflect on what other students had written	Would not work well for students who don't like to work in groups. Perhaps those that work best on their own should write out their answers on their own and then when they feel comfortable they can share with the rest of the group.	Allows the group a mechanism to learn how to understand that people each have differing perspectives of the same situation.
Easy to implement using technology or in a written format	Teacher needs to ensure that every student gets an opportunity to contribute. Don't let some students dominate.	A life tool NOT just a classroom tool
Promotes systematic thinking to evaluate a technology	Smaller groups (<=10) work better than larger groups.
Makes you move outside of your 'comfort zone'

My personal reflection on the specific tasks we were asked to complete.
When I went to complete this engagement activity I was confused by the instructions:

1. Instructions were not clear. Hard to understand.

2. Asked me to link to a webpage that was using a different course code "fahe11001" kept wondering if I was in the right place.

3. The activity said to look at details in the course materials - not sure where they were. Assuming now she meant engagement activity no 3 for Week 2.

4. Instructions on how to edit the wiki were confusing.

5. Took me a while to understand that there were two separate activities: evaluating the mobile phones; and commenting on the sample quiz questions.
6. The broken link to De Bono's Six Thinking Hats added to the confusion.

I liked the simple way Wendy broke us into groups for the activity. For the first task we self-selected into a group based on surname. That was clear and easy to understand and meant that instead of reading through 100 peoples' comments we only read about 30 peoples' comments. The second task on analysing the sample quiz questions was even better as there were 20 sets of sample questions and so each group had 4-6 people. I liked the second activity and I think that was because there was less 'busyness' on the page as only 3 other people had left comments.

I really enjoyed using De Bono's Six Thinking Hats as a framework of analysis. I was lucky enough in the past to have seen De Bono do a live presentation at the Gladstone campus on his Six Thinking Hats framework and was glad to have the opportunity again to refresh my knowledge of this simple but effective tool to scaffold student activities and promote HOTS. The value of using a thinking routine such as the Six Thinking Hats was demonstrated through the learning outcomes achieved in the mobile phone wiki activity.

There was only a week to complete this activity. There were some students who jumped in first and wrote their ideas. There were others, like myself, who wrote our contributions later. In my case this was due to being behind in my study and also I am a reflective worker so I wanted to read what others had contributed before I contributed my perspectives. In a face to face classroom, people jumping in and answering questions often silences quieter, more reflective students. They may feel that their answers or perspectives are not as good as those that have already spoken. This means that the class don't get to hear their contributions. In addition, some students are uncertain about presenting comments in a face-to-face discussion if they feel their ideas may be contentious. Using a wiki has the potential to create a situation were everyone could feel able to contribute to the discussion.

When using wikis in the classroom I would break the students up into small groups (3-5). That would help to prevent the feeling of being overwhelmed by the whole classes' comments. Also each group would be asked to develop a set of protocols to ensure that they don't accidentally overwrite each others' comments. I would also talk to them about expectations with respect to supportive and appropriate comments on other peoples' work.

PMI and de Bono's hats are techniques that I could employ in my teaching of Mathematics and IT in the secondary school environment to promote HOTS in the students. I believe that the use of thinking routines to scaffold online spaces is essential to the development of complex reasoning processes in my students. Scaffolding using a thinking routine allows easy organisation of ideas that are highly analytical and can support learning that moves the students into their zone of proximal development.

Summary of De Bono's Six Thinking Hats (Source: De Bono Thinking Systems)