Engagement Activity - Mobile Phones Wiki

The mobile phone activity was designed to discuss, collaborate ideas and perspectives using an online tool called the Wiki. The de Bono’s Hats framework was the method in which the range of perspectives were collected, organised and examined.

Additionally, this activity was designed to model and provide first-hand experience in achieving higher order thinking scaffolded by the use of de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats framework. A contemporary topic of mobiles phones was chosen. To promote discussion, the question asked was “What do you think about mobile phones in the classroom?”

An amalgamation of the Social Constructivist and Constructivist learning theories underpin the design of this activity. Elements of the activity which support this notion are evident from the participants learning in a collaborative community by sharing and using ideas of others. Learning takes place involving informal, networked, technology based forum. The result of participating in such a forum helped shift what the participants already know of the topic.

This activity required participants to share their perspectives into a shared online space using de Bono’s Hat as the scaffolding tool to help organise information and to promote higher order thinking.

Each of the inputs provided by the participants helped promote learning and facilitate a shift in thinking for the other participants. During the process of sharing information, learning is negotiated and the responses were analysed from the various perspectives to construct a balanced argument.

This was the second time I have used a Wiki for collaborative work. The first experience was designed differently where each comment was saved individually. It was designed without structure to help organise the information and this made it difficult to track everyone’s comments.

This experience of this mobile phone/wiki activity, however, involved providing comments into a shared space using de Bono’s hat to help organise information and promote higher order thinking. The de Bono’s framework was delightful to be engaged in, but the manner in which the de Bono’s was designed in this Wiki activity had some drawbacks.

While using the Wiki tool, I found the formatting process frustrating. I would evenly space out the text, save the work to find that the spacing was removed. To customise my text, I saved the colour and style of text by using the ‘Advanced (CCS)’ option under ‘Style Text’. When I applied this style, it applied the colour and font settings, but not the font size. This was frustrating to me as I then had to go back and manually change the font size, click on the save while holding my breath!

Throughout the whole process of updating my comments in the Wiki, I was in constant fear of accidently wiping someone else’s comments, or someone deleting mine. The risk with this type of collaboration is that you could easily delete other people’s text. Sometimes, I accidently formatted another person’s comments instead of my own. Other times I clicked on the cancel button instead on save and lost all my work! Luckily I had saved my work on a separate work document.

Precautionary steps were required in saving my work, which meant having to save the text into a separate word document, and then saving the text in the Wiki. This process is cumbersome and slow. For the students, this process may be missed or too slow causing frustration and loss of engaged.

In regards to sharing of perspectives, the comments in each of the six hats appeared to be similar. People may have similar perspectives, or they may have simply re-worded other people’s comments to save time. This is counterproductive as this model is all about analysing the various perspectives to construct a balanced argument.

At times, I felt that my perspectives were completely different from everyone else’s. I felt scared to share my views because I did not want to appear to be different or completely off track to everyone else.

No doubt that the issues I faced during this experience will be prominent with the students. Most students do not want to be seen as different and will hesitate to express this on-line for the world to see. Comments will be similar and the engagement of higher order thinking will not be utilised to effectively synthesis the information from the various perspectives. 

Technology is supposed to make life easy and faster. Using the Wiki in this fashion does not fit into this category. Overall, I would not incorporate the Wiki tool into my teaching practise. The sharing of perspectives and building knowledge through digital means is an invaluable and worthwhile experience for students, however, I would not use the Wiki tool in this fashion.