“This post was written by Sue Waters”
This third session from “Go Wild With Wikis” series (Classroom 2.0 beginners series) started with a discussion of reasons why students may be reluctant to participate online and then was a ‘hand-on’ interactive session where participants worked in teams to learn more about using wikis for collaboration.
A common assumption of using technology with students is they want to be using it. That isn’t the case; you’ll have a few students who won’t be happy to use and others that are reluctant online participators. Here’s a couple of the reasons why:
Impact of change
Some people automatic response to any type of activity that involves change is always This is Crap! I don’t want to do this!
Getting students to use technology as part of the learning, when used effectively, changes to how they learn. Those that don’t like change frequently respond negatively. It’s important not to be offended by the few students with this instinctive response. They will respond this way regardless of what activity you were asking of them if it involves change.
Remember familiar is known, comfortable and secure. Change is uncharted water; many people’s natural and rational response is resistance. Emotionally change can simultaneously bring joy and sorrow, gain and loss, satisfaction and disappointment.
The key to coping with this type of response is make the effort to learn more about the impact of change on people because helps manage resistance to change better!
Online Participation Rule
Sure it would be nice to believe that everyone participates equally online. But that isn’t the reality. Being aware that individuals can be reluctant online participators means you are more likely to:
- Monitor the extent at which each student is participating
- Actively focus on techniques for increasing students online participation
As a rule of thumb online communities user participation more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule (Jakob Nielsen):
- 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute)
- 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time
- 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs
Wikispaces wiki sandpit activity
For the rest of the session the participants were broken into teams to create content on any aspect of chocolate on a different page of the Edublogs Live wiki.
The screenshot below shows their instructions and each team’s wiki page on the wiki included these instructions plus links to resources to help them use wikis (see this wiki page as an example).
While each team worked I used application sharing so they can see how they might approach their activity.
The reasoning behind the activity was give them a taste of what it is like to collaborate with others on a wiki so they have a better understanding of the challenges and how to address these challenges.
You can check out the work each team did on these pages of the wiki:
- A-B: Chocolate recipes
- C-D: Chocolate history
- E-F: Favorite chocolate
- K-L: chocolate Story
- M-N: chocolate photo and video
- O-P: chocolate obesity
- S-T: Fair Trade Chocolate
When checking these pages make sure you look closely at how teams interacted in discussion and the content they created. Also remember they had limited time (30 minutes) to work on the task, entirely remotely and many were new to using wikis.
Thanks to Paula Naugle for inspiring the idea of chocolate theme for the session!
Recording (60 mins):
Blog posts and discussion forum
- Go Wild With Wikis: Part I
- Go Wild With Wikis: Part II
- Introducing The Classroom 2.0 LIVE! Beginner Series! – Sue Waters (read comments for helpful tips on using wikis especially issues with students overwriting each others work and need to use discussion tab)
- What is a Wiki – Anne Mirtschin
- The Flat Classroom Projects from a Paricipant’s Point of View – Anne Mirtschin
- Classroom 2.0 discussion on Go Wild With Wiki session
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June 26, 2009 at 1:28 pm
This looked like a really nice session Sue. I think your comments on how people react to change are very important for a web technology lesson. I believe this is an important keystone to establish for any web technology classroom. This baseline is missing from many classrooms which instead may spend most of their energies bombarding students with several different tools (there’s always tons of tools) until a semester ends. Empathy with students towards their reactions to uncharted territory also fosters a more collaborative spirit and environment which is an essential skill in the web 2.0 world.
Mahalo for the post!
June 26, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Thanks, Sue, for getting this posted. The Elluminate session was quite useful. Do you have (or could you point me towards) a clear guide towards when to use a wiki, a discussion forum, a blog, etc. for student learning? What kinds of learning goals is each better for? I am really looking for some kind of comparison chart, though it need not be in the form of a chart. Thanks.
June 27, 2009 at 1:07 am
Thanks Michael – definitely important to realise how students are impacted by being asked to change. It is important to focus on keeping it simple and making students understand how to use.
June 27, 2009 at 1:11 am
Good questions Bill. I think I have sort of covered it in one of the previous wiki posts.
Here is how I look at it – if you are trying to pull together a finished type project than wikis are well suited. If you are wanting to reflect on a topic, get students interacting with others easily or respond to questions than I would use a blog.
Discussion board you are normally thinking of using a Ning community. Sometimes educators will use these for classes of students instead of a blog. Challenge is they reduce interaction with others because only people who are members can respond.
June 28, 2009 at 6:13 am
@Bill Here is a good summary from Derek Wenmoth’s post where the information in brackets highlights how each is most commonly being used in K12 sector:
* blogs (reflective journals)
* wikis (collaborative content creation or supplementary lecture information)
* social bookmarking (expanding reading lists with social references and commentary)
* social networking (course discussion, initiated by both students and staff)
* immersive technologies (role playing)
July 7, 2009 at 7:54 pm
I finally got an opportunity to watch the recording of this webinar this morning. I have a few questions, observations and comments:
1. I like the idea that, as an instructor, you can easily track who participates in a group project and how they participated. This can always be difficult to assess with small groups.
2. How did you get the different letter groups to each have the same page to work on?
2. When I started playing with the sandpit wiki as I listened to the webinar, I saw that it was difficult for the group to keep a good track on a topic. The group I decided to join–Group E-F–seemed to bounce around ideas about what to make their wiki page about, but it seemed difficult for there to be any consensus or for a final decision to be made. I think it would be advisable when setting up small groups to work on wikis that roles be assigned (or rotated during the project). Someone should be responsible for directing the discussion. When it is time for a consensus to be reached or a decision to be made, the discussion director could put it to a vote. Votes could be emailed to a pollster via email with final results posted back on the discussion board. It seems that assignments could be doled out in a similar fashion with confirmation via email from a job coordinator so that it is clear who is supposed to do what. Without some way of communicating group consensus and decisions, it can really stymy progress, cause unnecessary confusion, and result in several people trying to do the same thing. This is not to say that participants should not revise, edit, and provide constructive feedback and ideas about each others’ work, but that the creative process can still be organized.
4. I played around with group E-F’s page and made some of my own changes just to get a feel for it.
5. Having seen a wiki in action and playing with the sandpit wiki has now given me ideas on how to use them. I have started one experiment with a wiki on wikispaces–redwormcafe. I hope to initially collaborate with a friend in a different part of the state on building this wiki. I am also hoping to get my teenager and some of her friends to choose a topic and start a wiki as a practice project. I so love these tools and see such potential, but am learning to practice and learn myself before springing it on a classroom full of students.
Thanks for your work, Sue.
July 8, 2009 at 2:37 pm
To be honest it is safer to only have one person edit the page at a time. The best example of coordinating group work on a wiki in my belief is the Flatclassroom project wikis. With them you will see a clear structure of roles as you suggest here.
The challenge we faced was really short time. If you did it with students in a f2f session you could structure the collaboration considerably better. I think watching how chaotic it can get was an important lesson for all. There was one group where you even saw some disharmony. Very important to lay very clear ground rules prior to starting and remember we need to teach people what is collaborating.
June 13, 2011 at 2:22 am
Fantastic,there is so much to learn.