Reflection 1, Week 2

In this blog post, we’ve been asked to reflect on the collaborative learning experience we participated in during the week. The experience involved the use of a wiki, and was scaffolded using de Bono’s Six Hats. The topic was “Should mobile phones be used in the classroom?”. I’ve made a quick video of the task so you can see what it looked like.

Design of the Activity

If I were designing this course, I think my goal for students would be:

1)    To understand what a Wiki is and how to participate in one

2)    To have an appreciation of what might go wrong and strategies to manage these concerns

3)    To synthesise the many theories, models and ideas they have been exposed to in the past two weeks and attempt to express how these ideas inform a particular learning experience (in this case, the use of a wiki)

As I discussed, in my video above, I think the use of de Bono’s hats to scaffold this activity was absolutely crucial in achieving those learning outcomes. Without some form of scaffolding, I think the activity would have been very messy, very loud and not conducive to meaningful collaboration at all.

Learning Theories and the Activity

I felt the activity was a good example about how learners can build knowledge and understanding together, and how they can build an understanding of a topic fairly independently from a teacher.

The task allowed us to read the opinions of our fellow students, see what information they had sourced and build our ideas based on that. I was prompted by another student’s comment to think about something I hadn’t even considered before. My focus was on the distraction that phones would pose in the classroom, how they would take away from learning. Another student noted that policing a ban would take a lot of effort and therefore distract teachers from actually teaching. It was a lightning bolt moment for me, and really had me rethinking my original opinion about the topic. This was a clear example of how constructivism can be used in the classroom.

Source: http://worldiscover.org/2014/09/03/the-map-of-where-the-lightning-fall-in-real-time/

Because the activity was a technology based one, I think it also promoted connectivity. At one stage, I saw a peer had noted that many students already owned phones. She cited a website that I was pretty sure wasn’t Australian. I was then prompted to wonder what the figures were for Australia. It was easy to open another tab and get busy searching for that information online. The wiki activity fed naturally into finding information from sources and linking to those sources so others could share the information.

Pedagogy and the Activity

After all the discussion on pedagogy, and starting to think about developing our own personal pedagogy this week, it was gratifying that when I sat down to think about this task, somethings jumped out at me right away. Maybe some of this is sinking in!

Here are the ways I thought the activity met the pedagogical principles we have looked at lately:

1.    Supportive learning environment – I don’t like discussing emotive topics with people in real life. But because this wasn’t face to face, and I knew I had the option to post anonymously if I so chose, it was easier to express what I really thought. I could hear from such a range of people, some of whom probably come from backgrounds quite different to my own, I was challenged to look at points of view and realities that I may have dismissed otherwise.

2.    Encouraging conversation – The online wiki naturally encourages students to collaborate and discuss, although I’ll share some thoughts about this later on.

3.    Encouraging independence – Although the task was structured with the thinking hats, we weren’t told exactly where to go to get our ideas. There was no reading list, and so we each had to go away, think about the topic, come up with sources to back up our assumptions and then present our conclusions. 

4.    Scaffolding higher order thinking skills – I thought the 6 hats achieved this objective nicely. They gave us a structure for considering different perspectives. It also allowed our thinking to be shaped by our peers. We had to think about the ideas they put out there, and perhaps reconsider or be ready to defend our own assertions. The 6 hats also helped organize the ideas ready for further tasks.

SAMR and the Activity

At a first glance, I guess you could say that a wiki is a mere substitution for having a face-to-face conversation, or sending a few emails back and forth. But I think this was more than that. It allowed us to conquer some rather obvious difficulties, namely distance, and it also allowed many of us to participate in the dialogue. You could go into different groups on the wiki and see what a whole range of people had to say. People added links to sources so you could see what they based their opinions on. And a wiki is quite a safe environment, people can post anonymously, they can take time to plan their responses and edit them, they can go away and research matters before posting. On the basis of that, I think we were definitely working in the transformative end of the SAMR model.

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Activity

Adapted from:

https://juliaec.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/blooms-taxonomy-encouraging-higher-cognitive-thinking-in-primary-school-classrooms/

The task certainly allowed us to demonstrate our understanding and comprehension of the topic, because we had to put our opinions into words that we felt our peers could understand (especially knowing that they would not be able to see our facial expressions, hear our tone etc.). But more than that, it encouraged us to analyse and defend our ideas, to allow our opinions to be shaped by the input of our peers. So I think we achieved some of the analysing, applying and evaluating categories of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

One thing that I found a little disappointing about the activity was the “linear” nature of discussion that eventuated. If you look in the groups (and certainly in my group), each person posted their ideas and that was it. There wasn’t a great deal of discussion, of commenting on each other’s thoughts. I felt that we were on our way to some critical thinking, as defined by Schafersman:

“Critical thinking is also critical inquiry, so such critical thinkers investigate problems, ask questions, pose new answers that challenge the status quo, discover new information that can be used for good or ill, question authorities and traditional beliefs, challenge received dogmas and doctrines,”

 (Schafersman, 1991)

through using such a wide range of perspectives to formulate and synthesise our ideas, to investigate the problem. But I felt that we didn’t really fully achieve critical inquiry. We didn’t question or defend.

Source: http://debonoshats.wikispaces.com/Group+5

I think part of this is a result of time constraints. But in the classroom, learners would benefit more from the task if there was scaffolding in place to allow greater discussion. I've added my ideas on this to the diagram of Bloom's Taxonomy above. For example, a follow up could be to weed out duplicate ideas. In each group, I saw a lot of this. This may have been because we each put our ideas into a Word document first and then cut and pasted them in. This meant that many of us added our ideas before we had read what was already there.

Another useful activity would be to have students prioritise the ideas they came up with. This touches further on the evaluate and create categories of Bloom’s taxonomy. If students have to create a list of their top 5 responses, they will naturally have to engage in further debate, defend their reasoning and make judgements as to what ideas stay and which are discarded.  If time were a concern, perhaps each group could be assigned just one colour hat to complete this task for. Then groups could create a poster or some other means of sharing their compilation with the other groups.

Final Thoughts
 Because we personally experienced the use of a wiki as a learning tool, I feel that I have a better understanding of how they can be successfully used in a classroom setting. I summarised my thoughts on scaffolding wiki learning experiences below.

1. Other ways to scaffold a wiki (6 hats is great, are there any other tools?)

 2. How to create my own wiki

Oh and finally, I’m really sorry Gary Glossop! Despite all my care, it seems that I deleted some of his comments in our group wiki. He was very forgiving though.

References

TLRP’s evidence-informed pedagogic principles http://www.tlrp.org/themes/themes/tenprinciples.html

Retrieved March 14, 2015

https://juliaec.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/blooms-taxonomy-encouraging-higher-cognitive-thinking-in-primary-school-classrooms/ Retrieved March 15, 2015

Puentedura, R. (2014) SAMR and Bloom's Taxonomy: Assembling the Puzzle

https://www.graphite.org/blog/samr-and-blooms-taxonomy-assembling-the-puzzle

Retrieved March 16, 2015

 Schafersman, S. D. (1991) An Introduction to Critical Thinking http://facultycenter.ischool.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Critical-Thinking.pdf

Retrieved March 18, 2015