Week 2: Reflection

This week we were asked as a collective to engage in an online activity using a wiki website. The wiki was an online discussion board with the topic of ‘Mobile Phones in the Classroom’. This wiki was designed on the activity of De Bono’s hats. De Bono’s hats clearly uses the learning theories of social constructivism. Social Constructivism considers the social interactions a student has within a learning or expert community. A major part of the process of learning in constructivism is modelling and scaffolding. Modelling and scaffolding is achieved by the support of the teacher or other learners. Collaboration and ‘bouncing’ around ideas with other students, as well as using a suitable tool are part of this learning process. 

Scaffolding was a major part of the de Bono’s hats wiki activity, as it supports the contributions of all students’ viewpoints and used a virtual tool in order to discuss the topic.  Using this virtual tool of a wiki space allowed us as students to collaborate our ideas online without having to get together and organise a list of pros and cons. It was also easier to add or delete ideas without cluttering or messing up the discussion, which can happen when using pen and paper. By collaborating ideas together, I learnt some very different viewpoints on the topic of ‘Mobile Phones in the Classroom’ from my fellow peers, who had well justified answers.  

De Bono’s hats as an online wiki activity was successful in our learning for a few reasons. The De Bono’s hats activity highly benefited our knowledge by the use of the learning technique of scaffolding. This activity supported complex reasoning processes by the questions asked for each topic of the hats (i.e. positive, negative and creative), bringing forward various justified answers and arguments for each of those topics. All participating students supported the activity with their contributions to the topic in building their other peers viewpoints. Another purpose for the online wiki activity is for our teachers to be able to visibly find the reasoning behind each student’s thoughts on the topic of ‘Mobile Phones in the Classroom’.

I found the wiki website to be well set out, easy to follow and a great learning tool in students being able to learn from each other and develop their own knowledge. There is only one downside I have realised about using a wiki website as an activity, it is very easy to edit and delete information. This would not be appropriate in a classroom scenario where the children could not be trusted or could easily accidentally delete their own or other peers discussion points.  Overall, I quite enjoyed the learning experience of an online wiki-activity and could definitely be used as a possible activity in my teaching career.