Learning Wiki with a PMI thrown in for good measure.

Having just completed my learning theories wiki I wanted to reflect quickly on what I learnt. Funny that.  Well I did exactly what was required. I teamed up with another person who I thought I would work well with. That was Julienne Morrison and we met at the residential school. Turns out we both live in Yeppoon, we both have kids, we both work with kids,  we're both in a similar age bracket... but Julienne is even crazier than I am cause she has decided to do the course full time.

We chose the article by Prensky (2001) on Digital Natives versus Digital Immigrants and surprise surprise it turns out Julienne and I are both Digital Immigrants. Why? Because despite the fact we are studying a course on ICT's and desperately trying to incorporate them into everything we do... we decided to get together at my house... with a cup of tea and some Tim Tams so that we could ... you guessed it....... Print off the article page after page, read it together and then come up with our ideas for the PMI on shock horror.....Paper. Face to face the old fashioned way.

We then slowly and methodically loaded our ideas onto the learning theories wiki, that took us about 30 minutes, not sure if that's fast or slow. 

Sorry Deb and Wendy.... no online collaboration for us... no working in different colours, posing questions, blogging back and forth and wikiing all over the place... we're just a couple of old immigrants battling our way through the digital age of learning. But we are enjoying ourselves and slowly but surely we're beginning to see how this whole ICT business works!

Maybe next year encourage people to pick someone who is the opposite of them and then I would have been forced to adapt and go online to meet and greet my study buddy and work through our ideas by texting, google chatting, Skypeing and wikking it up. And I know my modern day study buddy would have forced me to do this because as Prensky himself says an immigrant has learnt to adapt but natives will never go backwards!

I did enjoy your company though Julienne and we would never have been able to have that discussion and  demonstration of my time saving robotic vacuum cleaner now would we...


P.S..........

 I have returned to this blog after my course "ohhhhhh so that's what it is all about" moment overnight and realised that I didn't adequately reflect on the learning profiles wiki. So in summary I would say that a wiki is a really valuable tool in a constructivist classroom. It allowed all students to get involved in the activity and then create their own meaning out of it.

But connectivism also had a role to play. Siemens (2005) says of a mentor programme in the USA... " this amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism" and in this way the collaboration involved in the PMI wiki was for me a fantastic example of this. Students listened not just to their teacher but more importantly to their peers.... which is also reflective of Constructivism where the teacher becomes not the all knowing lecturer but the facilitator to learning, guiding the students but never preaching.

On a practical level it allowed for a huge volume of information ( 10 or more readings) to be summarised quickly and succinctly not by the teacher by by their peers. The benefit of the PMI scaffold is that students are asked to reflect on what they liked about the article AND what they didn't like so that balance is achieved even if the individual student was biased one way or another. The I.. or Interesting part of the PMI scaffold allows the students to take the knowledge further and pose their own questions about what might be interesting. So knowledge was transformed.

The activity would support a diverse range of students... those that chose to work in teams, or others that didn't team up as such but decided to contribute to others work on the same article. They way we were asked to collaborate was also a way of supporting a diverse range of learning styles. Many conducted the PMI strictly online, others chose to phone, email or meet face to face. Lastly as an e-learning strategy is was very effective. Through the PMI wiki and the subsequent blog postings and discussion on yview and the forums it became active and online for all students.