From slate and chalk to wiki and blog

(original image courtesy of shutterstock.com)

Remember the stories your grandmother told you about back in the day when she’s had to walk 59 km through snow and hail to get to school? Well, along with those stories, my grandparents reminded me of the fact that they never used to write in books, but that they were given square slabs of slate rock and some chalk to do their school work with. Unless they had monster pets back then the option of “the dog ate my homework” wouldn’t get very far.

They would write on the slab to practice for instance their handwriting, times tables or spelling and by the end of a lesson, it all gets cleared. Now let’s think through the implications of this:

Their work held no permanency and there wouldn’t have been any opportunities for them to show their parents their work...well, not much of it anyway. In other words, school was not a place where you were able to access the “real world” where adults write in books with pens, but rather, it was a place where students were to practice out-of-context skills for the sake of perfecting them. Contribution, connection and conversation held no value in education, and perhaps that’s how they liked it back in those days.

A very big shift has taken place in the minds of educators over the past century, especially with the advent of Vygotsky’s constructivist theory of learning in 1978. Many now emphasize the knowledge construction process and believe that "meaning making" develops through social interaction. Therefore, the more contextualised the learning environment or content, the greater the success for students. It’s a matter of connecting learners with real-world scenarios where they can participate in the workings of their society, and create “artefacts of learning” (Ferdig and Trammell, 2004) along the learning journey.

Just like slate and chalk reflected the understandings of education of its day, weblogs (blogs) and wiki’s epitomise contemporary notions of education, and are able to harness the power of connected learning. Blogs and wiki’s can “open up communication beyond the student-teacher relationship and offer the possibility to interact with practitioners. With a worldwide audience students are more compelled to write authentic, credibly and accurately. In short, instead of reproducing knowledge just for the teacher the worldwide audience facilitates knowledge construction.”

[BLOGS]

A BLOG IS...

“A public website where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies, updated frequently and normally reflecting the views of the blog's creator” (Worldwidelearn, 2010). Some create blogs for relaying news and information, while others use it as a platform for expressing opinions, or displaying artistic ideas. A blog can be commented on by readers, but only the original creator is able to edit their work.

Why blog in the classroom?

“Students create meaning while browsing, reading and reflecting about blog postings having reactions and receiving feedback to their blog entries rethinking their ideas and sharing them again. The benefits are that students are able to build an ever-growing knowledge on a particular topic and that they can actively take ownership of their own learning while receiving input and suggestions from others (Wittner and Wageneder, 2005).

The pedagogical power of a blog lies in the fact that it can be used to motivate peer interaction, since the blog material is accessible to all students for discussion and reflection and the comment feature allows for some degree of feedback and response. It allows an avenue of expression to those learners who, in a typical class situation, would never give their contributions.

The website www.infinitethinkingmachine.org provides some practical examples of what educational blogging could look like:

Teachers can:

• Post resources, lessons, and homework.
• Keep parents up-to-date on class happenings.
• Reflect on their own teaching practices and share their ideas with other educators.

Students can:

• Share schoolwork with their peers, parents, and others.
• Collaborate on projects and get feedback from others.
• Keep a reflective journal throughout the school year.

Some examples for primary - middle - senior school:

Primary: Post a series of images and links to great reading activities that kids can do from home.

Middle school: Use a blog to post homework assignments and reflection questions, then ask students to respond in the comments.

High School: Students can use blogs across the curriculum to keep journals, lab notes, and other assignments online. When students post a response to an assignment, ask them to comment on their peers’ writing.

Considerations for blogging:

• Because of the public nature of blogs, all students need to be aware of netiquette, privacy issues and safe practices. To increase security, a teacher could control blog privacy or select a blog type which restricts certain aspects that might lead to irrelevant or indecent information.
• Students communicating on a blog need frequent monitoring. Before allowing students to blog, they need to be given strict procedures and rules for blogging so that they know the guidelines and the consequences for not following them. It will prevent personal attacks or foul language used in the blogs. Additionally, some students automatically go into "IM" or "texting" mode, so this might need to be addressed before commencing a blog.
• Blogs are not the most effective e-tool for conversational discussions or group communication

[WIKI’S]

A wiki is...

An online platform for multiple authors to work on a project collaboratively. Where blogs are made up of chronologically ordered author-posts and user comments, wiki’s represent the consensus of multiple users who can create, modify and organise the web page content, thus creating a dynamic, continuously changing site.

Why Wiki’s in the classroom?

The Wiki environment fosters collaboration and helps build a social connection that goes beyond the formal classroom environment. It can empower students by giving them a chance to express their views and help them with reading, writing, reflective, and team-work skills. Interaction between learners' draws them to a deeper level of participation and in Wiki-based learning, this increased participation “has the potential for enhancing communication and social interaction, which may result in deeper knowledge retention” (Hazari, North, Moreland, 2009).

The web site www.smartteaching.org provides 50 ways for using a wiki and has divided these up into a number of categories. Listed below is an excerpt of some of these ideas.

• Resource Creation:

Virtual field trips: Have your students research faraway places they would like to go on a field trip, and get them to share images and information about the location.

• Student Participation:

Exam review: Encourage students to share review notes and other helpful pieces of information on your classroom’s wiki.

• Group Projects:

Group authoring: By asking groups to use central documents in a wiki, you can ensure that everyone’s documentation will be uniform

• Student Interaction:

Mock-debate: Pit two class candidates against each other and perform a debate on your wiki.

• For the Classroom:

Classroom scrapbook: Share news, photos, and current achievements in your classroom on a wiki page.

• Community:

International sharing: Collaborate with a class from another country and share information about your culture, or even a day in the life of a typical student.

• Other

Teacher collaboration: Work with other teachers to create lesson plans and track students’ success.

Considerations for Wiki’s:

- Despite the potential benefits of using Wikis for course assignments, grading of Wiki assignments can pose a challenge to instructors. With new types of customized Web learning environments, it is necessary to determine if these environments are meeting the needs of learners (Hazari, North, Moreland, 2009).

- Questions such as how to form groups, how to manage teams that may have students from different background, how to establish project scope or foster teamwork need to be addressed before student teams are given the assignment.

- Students also may be unsure of their role in a group as they may not have interacted previously with team members. The teacher might therefore be required to assign roles and responsibilities to students, set protocol for interaction, establish deadlines and proofread results before final submission deadline.

Resources/links:

DeLaBruere, L., Duffield, J., Fryer, W., Gray, L., Hargadon, S., March, T., Walsh, C., Wagner, M. (2010). Blogger in the classroom. Retrieved online, August 3, 2010, from http://www.infinitethinkingmachine.org/stuff/Blogger.pdf

Ferdig, R., Trammell K. (2004). Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere'. Retrieved online August 2, 2010 from http://www.thejournal.com/articles/16626.

Hazari, S., Moreland, A. (2009). Investigating pedagogical value of wiki technology. Retrieved online August 3, 2010, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4041/is_200907/ai_n32128811/pg_3/?tag=content;col1

Wittner, R., Wageneder, G. (2009). What are blogs and how does it work? Retrieved online August 2, 2010, from http://www.sbg.ac.at/zfl/eTeaching_Skills/eTeaching_Weblogs/basics.html

WorldWideLearn (2010). E-learning essentials: what is e-learning? Retrieved online on August, 20^th, 2010 from http://www.worldwidelearn.com/elearning-essentials/elearning-glossary.htm#b.