I feel as though I am being asked to comment on the aspects of the dynamics of flight and how to build a plane after being pushed off a cliff with three bits of wood and some bailing twine. This is however a constuctivist world now and I will reach into my proximal learning zone and use some connectivism to survive it.
I have not tried a PMI strategy before so will try it this time,
POSITIVES:
It is wiki wiki = Hawaiin for fast. link
Ease of use: a wiki is very easy to produce and to edit.
wonderful tool for group work, collaboration, brainstorming.
Can be structured by teacher to scaffold learning experiences.
Allow students to contribute without classroom pressure.
Can create side comment pages to further focus / filter information.
Can provide links so creates a form of connectivism for other students.
Class activity can be monitored using running history.
A place that children can be engaged and relatively self directed.
Further positives / uses from course wiki
Class activity can be monitored using running history.
A place that children can be engaged and relatively self directed.
Further positives / uses from course wiki
MINUSES:
Can not create a real time dialogue.
Student content can be overwritten / lost / so requires monitoring and history checking so can be time consuming for teacher to control.
If two people contributing at once information can be lost.
Can be opinion based.
Project needs to be time sensitive otherwise relevancy may be lost to earlier contributors.
Possibility of early posts controlling thought processes of others.
Has some risk for privacy and confidentiality, bullying, it is a public space, rules needed and to be enforced. Further to this I asked my 15 and 17 year old daughters about Wiki use in their school and they were dead against them citing technical and personal privacy issues, to quote, "no way do I want to put my personal thoughts and work where anyone can read them!" Interesting.
INTERESTING:
Perhaps use as a tool for student feedback.
Great way to assess prior knowledge on a subject before teaching it, brainstorming, building bridges, KWL strategies. (QSA, 2009)
A place for students to pool resources for, research, exams or projects. A place that they can create and manage, with some oversight / scaffolding, themselves. (Cool cat teacher link)
Students may be able to creatively write a story, novel, factual text as a collaborative. (source)
What is fantastic is the web itself and the plethora of options, ideas and opinions out there that can be used to apply wiki's. I think with a clear idea of what content and outcomes are to be achieved i.e. good pedagogy, and with some creativity wiki's are a very versatile tool.
As a discussion regarding the uses by the teacher and the students to support, facilitate and transform learning we need go no further than to review the positives and the interesting. Wiki's are a beautiful tool to help create collaborative learning in the constructivist learning model and is well supported in the connectivism model of supported learning. Students can be collaborative and fully participant in the learning journey. If scaffolded and reviewed well it can create true ownership and stimulate creativity. This is a link to education Tasmania and gives wonderful overview of scaffolding and ICT's. It is the bringing together of all ideas from the TPACK framework discussed earlier. Great scaffolding ideas can be found at our course wikispaces site and include; ranking tools, PMI, SWOT, Compare / contrast, collaborative authoring, Six hats and project drafting to name a few.
This of course means, as stated in minuses, that clear boundaries must be established and rules of ethical and legal behaviour will be adhered to at all times. This is a Link to a good website for a discussion and further links for internet safe and ethical practice. This issue in itself though is an excellent learning for the real world environment and establishes opportunities for web use discussion and research. Part of early usage of wiki's could be a creating a scaffolded student wiki exercise for example a KWL in researching ethics and correct referencing in the web based format and building a wiki of class ethics. See course notes for further info.
I have researched into web etiquette and this can be found in my wiki.
I have researched into web etiquette and this can be found in my wiki.
Earlier thoughts on Wiki's can be found in one of my previous blog reflections.
References:
References:
Queensland Studies Authority, (2010) Teaching reading and viewing, Comprehension
strategies and activities for years 1-9. Retrieved from http:// http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/downloads/p_10/engl_teach_read_view_comprehension.pdf
Hi Michael. Great blog, and I particularly love this post ... informative and very entertaining!!! I hope you are enjoying wikis more now that we're delving deeper (but I have to say, they are my least favourite tool ... not very user friendly!!).
ReplyDelete