I have been thinking for some time about the nature of collaborative learning at all ages and stages. The wiki that I have been championing for my school staff for about 8 months now has had quite a different outcome (so far) to the one for my GCSE students - started around the same time. The one for my MA students has been different again.
Staff wiki
mainly publishing and lurking going on here, see below for what I intend to do about this
GCSE wiki
again, lots of publishing BUT the recent addtion of the page called "hey! don't pass notes in class!" has been a major turnaround because they are now really collaborating in their learning in class time and to some degree with their assignments as well
MA wiki
questions asked of one another has made this more collaborative in nature from the outset, with students eager to help each other and to discuss openly, however, room for improvement, again see below.
Linking to my last post about theories of learning, and to Howard Rheingold's SFGate (see earlier blog post) and his ideas about attention literacy, I think that the next stage for the staff wiki and the MA wiki is to actually get participants to start blogging themselves and to link this in to the 'master wiki' or 'master blog'. I'd like to use twitter for this as well.
For the MA wiki, I will start this with the next cohort in September since the current one are nearing the end of the module.
For the staff wiki, am starting tomorrow! There are four newly Qualified Teachers who have to produce some action research as part of their assessment. Tomorrow I am running a session with them on how to undertake this project. I am going to ask them to blog their progress and use collaborative reflective writing to put it all together. if this goes well, I will also approach just a few more experienced staff and ask them to blog risk taking lessons 9with videos perhaps) and again to put together some collaborative reflective writing.
Watch this space.
I'm curious, are you planning on looking at reflection and collaboration as part of your ECA? And if so, would this be in terms of designing your own study to look at wikis?
ReplyDeleteWell I am working on a paper to do with using the wiki as a means of mixed methods research. Yes, I hope to use this as my ECA so that I can get some feedback - I'm going to work on the paper proper in August. The thing about H809 is that it has made me think a lot more about the collaborative nature of learning, whereas initially I was mostly looking at reflection ....
ReplyDeleteJo are you on Twitter?
ReplyDeleteOh ok, sounds like a pretty good idea to me, especially since you're already thinking about a paper. I'm glad H809 has given you a lot to think about too! I'd be interested to see how your ideas develop once you get a chance to work on the ECA properly.
ReplyDeleteI'm not on twitter actually, mainly because I'm not sure how convinced by it. Or maybe I just don't know enough people who use it to make it seem worthwhile. Plus, it might turn out to be yet another internet distraction and with blogging and facebook, I probably have enough of these already!
Thanks for the encouragement Jo. I sometimes think I have too many ideas all at once and need reining in a bit - which, in some ways. H809 has done because it's made me focus rather than doing the scatter gun approach that my supervisor used to warn me about! Alos the materials are good, I enjoy the podcasts and reading other blogs too.
ReplyDeletere Twitter, I know what you mean sort of. It took me about 2 years after first being introduced before I *took the plunge*. It is a *diversion* if you are not careful. On the other hand, it's a good way of getting links etc. and trying to keep up . You have to do some serious sifting though.