Thursday 3 April 2014
Collaboration with Wikis
In Elola &Oskos (2010), it appeared that the groups working with help from a forum were more focused on the content of their knowledge building than the groups working with help a wiki. How could this happen? And how could you stimulate students to demonstrate the same processes (more focus on content, more continuous evolving work, etc.), while working with a wiki?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think this is partly because forums are more process-oriented than wikis. In forums, learners can see a flow of thinking processes of their peers as shown in a chronological / thematic order. However, in wikis, the knowledge construction process is more dependent on changing things to finally come up with a final product, decision, etc. Basically, 'exchange' (forums) and 'change' (wikis) orientations of the tools make the difference.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Merve on the reason. And as to how we could motivate the students, I would say teachers need to prepare the tasks in such a way that students will have to contribute to the knowledge building by focusing on and changing the content. However, teachers need to be careful while choosing the tool. If it is forums that draw the focus on content rather than wikis, then why not use forums instead?
ReplyDeleteI think that guidance provided by the teacher should lead the students to focus on the content. The question raised by Sinem is also worth considering. If forums work better why not prefer them?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you all, but I think the problem lies within the question as trying to compensate for a tool's limitations within itself could be very challenging, may take a lot of time or may be impossible at times. So my point is that teachers should focus on their TPCK and the ends not the means(tech tools in our case). So when plannig to teach writing, the aim should be improving students' writing skills as much as possible, not using wikis only. This belief can help teachers exploit wikis as well as chats, forums, and class discussions to compensate for wikis' limitations.
ReplyDelete