Second Life Journey

Chilling at the house...

Collaboration and Learning with Wikis

Hughes and Narayan (2009) investigated perceptions of undergraduate and graduate students on educational use of wikis. They used wikis for creating a key-term glossary and for creating an assignment archive. Interestingly, they found that "frequency of editing and changing wiki information occurred less often than posting original contributions ... students would perceive the wiki as a static information collection and dissemination tool rather than a dynamic, knowledge-based learning community" (p. 67)

This is an important issue in educational use of wikis. There are several reasons why students do not edit or change information that others created.

- Tasks promoted adding information, but did not require editing and changing previous information. --> I have investigated this issue with Jae Jin Lee and Dr. David Jonassen. Tasks play an important role in co-construction of knowledge in wikis.
- Students might not be able to negotiate the changes of information in the wiki.
- Editing others' writing might make students uncomfortable. They migth not want to make conflicts with peers. Costs of changing texts written by peers may be higher than its benefits.

What else reasons can prevent students from co-constructing knowledge in wikis?

Hughes, J. E., & Narayan, R. (2009). Collaboration and learning with wikis in post-secondary classrooms. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 8, 63-82.

Learning model in BYU

I read a news about the Learning Model used in Brigham Young University Idaho and visited the website

There are three steps in the model: (1) Prepare, (2) Teach one another, and (3) Ponder. I agree with this instruction model because students can be actively engaged in learning activities. In the examplar class (International Foundations) at the website, a case study method was used, and an instructor asked lots of deep resoning questions. He also had students make arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttals. From these activities, students may understand multiple perspectives on one political issue.

What technology can effectively support this instructional model? How can technology support the learning activities at each step?

- Students need to know what their peers think.
- An instructor needs to know what his or her students think of a topic or a case problem.
- Students may want to show some evidences from other websites
- Students may want to see relationships between arguments (Before reading all contents, they may want to overview on-going discussion)

New literacies: Expanding our understanding of literacy with technology

I went to the brown bag seminar yesterday. The seminar was ...
"The world of wikis, blogs, tweets, YouTube video, Google Earth, iPods and smart phones, new literacies is changing the way students learn and process information in the classroom. At this month's Brown Bag Lunch Series we will discuss how new technology is changing the concept of literacy and how tools can be used to engage students."

The presentation of Dr. Clyde Bentley was impressive. He argued that educators do not need to teach college students technology itself, but they might ask students to interact with each other with new technologies. He said that the interaction is the most important characteristic of new technologies. He showed some examples of educational use of Blog and E-mail. His journalism school students in MU shared ideas with students in Europe and published news of European pop culture in a blog (EuroKulture). The Blog is very interesting. You may want to visit the website.

Web 2.0 way of learning with technologies

Rollett et al. (2007) described the features of Web 2.0:
(1) Long tail
(2) Data is the next Intel Inside; less is more; simplicity and efficiency
(3) Users add value; peer production; co-creation; social tagging; folksonomies; tag clouds; tag networks and clusters; collective intelligence; wisdom of the crowds or aggregate knowledge
(4) Network effects by default
(5) Some rights reserved; legal remixability; transformation; mashups
(6) Perpetual beta
(7) Cooperate, do not control
(8) Software above the level of a single device; web as platform

You can see the meanings of key words in the article.

Rollett, H., Lux, M., Strohmaier, M., Dosinger, G., & Tochtermann, K. (2007). The Web 2.0 way of learning with technologies. International Journal of Learning Technology, 3(1), 87-107. (Download)

Study of Web 2.0

I do not know much about Web 2.0, but I know it has a lot of potential. So, I would like to share some ideas and information about educational use of Web 2.0 with my colleagues in the MU and in the world.