Group 1 tools - Online spaces, Wikispaces.
This week I joined in on adding to the mobile phone wiki for this course using the framework of De Bono's thinking hats. I found this a challenging activity, to join in collaboration with others and put my opinions into an online environment where they could be judged.
It occurs to me that students may also feel confronted by using online learning spaces to collaborate. From this I have been reflecting on the scaffolding that might be important in using wikis to support learning. A large part of my teaching philosophy includes embracing mistakes as opportunities for learning .
Following on from this thought, I liked the idea of using the thinking hats to allow for students to enter the discussion somewhere they felt comfortable. It also seemed to allow for a growth of knowledge, a real construction of knowledge, socially constructed but stored in an outward environment rather than just constructed in our minds. In this way I began to understand the ideas presented in the summary of learning theories and other course materials. Specifically the reading I have begun to do on connectivism.
This theory really challenged my thinking by presenting the idea that knowledge can be constructed outside of humans, within machines and organisations. While I was comfortable with the ideas that connectivism builds upon social constructivist theory and addresses modern issues in learning such as the judgement or valueing of information, a necessary part of learning within such an information saturated society, I pondered for a while on this notion that learning can happen in machines. It seemed to present a futuristic view of the world which hinted at intelligent machines, like something from a science fiction novel. I guess the truth is stranger than fiction though, and intelligent machines do exist and are part of our everyday world. Facebook's security system for example manages to learn through experience of spam and evolve its systems.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21095-inside-facebooks-massive-cybersecurity-system.html
Similarly machines form part of our learning, recording and assisting recall in many ways. I often no quickly look up word definitions while reading online, and follow links to further my understanding of articles. I sift through links, disseminating the information, in short connectivism rings true for me.
As a student myself the use of this wiki inspired me to engage more in online spaces for other course work. The wiki environment felt comfortable for me however I found myself wanting more control and privacy so the answer for me was to set up and use a Facebook group in another course
https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/223497821050625/ . This group allowed for interaction in an online space and the facebook doc feature worked similarly to a wiki. The advantages of using the Facebook doc was that it was a familiar environment for me and my fellow learners and in some ways that made it less intimidating. It also allowed us to have a closed group space, not accessible by other students in our cohort, although our lecturer was added to the group so that we could still share in a way that could be monitored. A downside however was the limits of the doc function, compared to a wiki editor it was difficult to really make changes and Facebook's interface was temperamental at times. Facebook is cautiously being embraced as a learning environment however there are things to consider...More here. For this reason as a teacher using a simulated facebook style form may be a safer way to use this concept one such resources already exists.
I have also seen examples of online teaching spaces that are styled on Facebook's system Edmondo is one such site and other similar sites are being trialled to varying degress of success. Notesharing forms of social media are also other ways that social media is producing online study spaces. Halsey, an educator in a school that harnessed using the internet for engaging students through the use of a platform known as 'frog' had this to say about digital environments and their usefullnes,
"[Young people] spend all their time at home on the internet," he says.
"They are using technology, they've got their phones, they've got
Facebook, they've got all this stuff, they are very used to processing
information that way. Then come to school and we present them with a
textbook and a pen. That's such a sharp contrast".
As a teacher, I think the idea of social networking is a great way to extend collaborative groups outside the classroom. As an early childhood teacher I can see that wiki spaces provide another platform for collaboratively networking, not so much the individual students in my classes but the student community by giving a classroom space for parents and other community stakeholders to also be involved. That the students themselves can also contribute to this by embedding and uploading content either from a school computer or from their homes makes this a very accessible and valuable tool .
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