Cooperation tools: wikis vs Y!G (the choice)

I am managing a project where teachers of several schools, some far apart, have to cooperate. So I had to decide which sharing tool could be suitable for our needs.

As a first choice, after previous experiences, I thought that a wiki could be the best option: a wiki hosted on my school's web site or rather on an online service as pbwiki, with restricted access to the teachers involved in the project.

Then I remembered Yahoo!Groups, which I had used in past occasions only in a very limited way, and mainly out of curiosity, the choice fell on this latter tool.

First of all it's simpler than a wiki, which would have been a totally new experience for most of my colleagues. The major source of problems for Y!G, as far as I know, is a subscription process that's not completely linear, with the need to create a Y! profile and this sometimes gets the process stuck.

Yahoo!Groups is surely less flexible and more standardized and does not allow all the management freedom characterizing a wiki. But perhaps for teachers just learning to use web tools to cooperate and work together, a wiki is overdimensioned and too complex without an adequate of initial training.

Besides, Y!G is essentially a mailing list, and this is the feature primarily interesting in my case. The file repository is enough for contents to be shared and modified, and news can be transmitted through collective messages.

I plan to go back to this topic at the end of the project, to give a more factual assessment of this use of Y!G.

A notice to the surfers

I know you are there, I can see you thanks to this smart thingo on the right. I see that many of you just fall in these pages by chance, looking for things they won't surely find here. But others, on the contrary, are sent here by efficient search engines that correctly answer to searches for information that can actually be found in this blog.

If you belong to the latter...

Why don't you drop a line? "I found you while I was looking for this or that. I found this post interesting". Or "I didn't find this blog interesting at all!". "Why don't you check my site/this article...". Etc.

It's nothing difficult. And it's a pleasure for me, while I am trying, not quite successfully in recent times, to maintain this blog a place where things can be found.

Thank you!

Sins of omission

I am really sorry I don't have more time to surf the net in search of websites managed by colleagues and containing ideas about the link between the net and teaching. Really interesting suggestions can be found.

For example, in his "The Thinking Stick" blog, Jeff Utecht offers some important notes about something few teachers and school managers have understood over here. Students are on the net, have their own social presence, do talk, even about the "XY School", even about their teacher John Doe. If they are the only ones to do so, all that will be found online about the "XY School" or about professor John Doe is what students write...

Is it necessary, then, to "occupy" spaces, to use one's name in a massive way so that the information we want to be visible can prevail on the students' chatter? I don't know, but personally I think that if not necessary, it is at least important. Surely being aware of the situation is good. Not taking care of one's name on the internet can become an unpleasant omission with no significant belated remedies.

But there is another kind of omission, in my opinion, regarding us teachers from even closer in our relationship with our students. A very good way to be on Facebook or other social networks is garrisoning. There are, unfortunately, those (even colleagues), who misuse or abuse these channels. Direct personal experience. To be there means, beside a lesson in style, a form of moderation of potentially harmful situations for our students and for the images of our schools. Certainly we can pretend we are not there. But we know perfectly well that we wouldn't be quite honest, and besides, vices and virtues are often seen collectively, and rarely the faults of one don't reverberate on the others. Rightly so.

On wikis again

To speak some more about wikis, I found that Kristen Fouss produced a nice mathematical wiki.

The introductory page specifies that this wiki, a collection of notes or a summary of the content of some courses, was made by the members of her classes.

When I saw it first, I was quite dumbstruck. And to imagine that I spent two hours (network slow, someone not remembering his email password, someone else not remembering his wiki password, two sharing the same computer, one kicking the power supply cord and switching off someone else's computer, the evacuation test, the assistant passing with some notices...) in the lab just to make sure that all the students of a class could subscribe the wiki they were going to use... How long could it take to produce a wiki like Kristen's? And the exercises? After devouting a whole month's time to create a kiwi, are the students capable to solve all the exercises they are supposed to solve by the syllabus?

Then, after a moment's depression, I go back to my practical philosophy, and repeat my mantra: a wiki is a tool serving didactics, it is not the heart of what you are doing. Which, in this case, means: if you succeed, it's ok, if not, it's ok all the same.

In this post I summarized the conclusions of a survey among the participants of my four classes to the wiki work last year. In my opinion there are some important points in favour of it being a fruitful way of working.

1. First of all it's interesting to notice that all students found positive, motivating aspects in the wiki activity just done.
2. A greater part of the students, besides, appreciated the collaborative work that wikis make possible. This, actually, is not a necessary feature of wikis, but rather of the work organization behind it.
3. Also interesting is to see how some students were able to reflect about their own learning with this work: some did express opinions about the usefulness of this didactic methodology in the different kinds of learning involved.

I think that, by themselves, these three objectives are worth pursuing as priorities and justify the adoption of a didactic methodology, independently on other reasons: if I have tools capable of 1) motivate students in their study, 2) lead students to live building knowledge in a collaborative way and 3) raise their attention about the state of their learning, a critical capacity towards their learning, I would say that these tools are to be used.

I am perfectly aware about the fact that a wiki, by itself, is not the solution of the problems of didactics. And I am equally aware about the fact that there are other tools capable of leading to the same objectives, even a much-despised frontal lesson, if well prepared and managed. And this last thing actually comforts me in particular, seen the sometimes awful conditions of ITC facilities in some of our schools.

Nevertheless, I maintain that working on a wiki, today, is an excellent learning experience, both for students and for teachers. I have no problems admitting that, knowing only marginally the use of wikis prior to this experiment, after it I installed on my computer a local wiki (Mediwiki), which today I widely use both form my school and home stuff.

And the same might happen to students. The added value is not in a better organization, but in being able to transfer what they learn at school in their daily life, to integrate working, researching, cooperating, elaborating, building, analytic and syntetic methods in their daily actions. These are all things that OECD-PISA will never be able to measure, but that, in my opinion, are worth double the amount of the notions that are received and soon forgotten in our schools.

Blog

I've decided I am going to experiment on blogs at school this year.

It seems to me that a blog, as a personal (I like this "personal" more than "individual") mean of expression, is fit for working outside ordinary contents, delving and internalizing knowledge.

Technically, I visited the Scuola-ER portal managed by my regional school authority, and probably with one of my classes I shall try using it. Anyway I find blogger easier and more suitable for its user management options.

For now I have launched the thing with one out of my three classes. I was too curious and I couldn't wait to be back from my paternal leave next month. With the other two classes I will probably wait until I am back, also seeing what happens with the active one.

In any case, the blog is hidden, accessible only to me and the students of the class. I wrote the parents (as I had done last year for the wiki) to explain my intentions and reasons. Tomorrow we'll start working on it.

Being first of all a personal work, I am quite curious to see how much the students will let themselves be "caught". I will keep you updated.        

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Wind blowing

School educational board, programming for the now starting year.

Asked by the Principal to speak about the school web site, I end my improvised talk saying: "ah, and well, should anyone be interested in experimenting anything in the field of web applications in education, I've read and done some little things and I am available to share and work together...".

The Principal: "Well then it would be really good if we could organize an internal personnel-update course for those teachers who are interested in these topics!".

How can you not like a school like this?

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Wikis with fifteen-sixteen-agers

Just to get back in activity with the blog, I'm updating the last post.

Wikis with fifteen-sixteen-agers. We finished them and the wikis are (almost) ready and eventually I was able to sort the final questionnaires and put them together.

Four classes, four wikis, one about electrization, one about lightnings and two about equilibrium in fluids.

The work was arranged as follows:

1. researching infos to answer some questions raised by observing some phenomena
2. information accumulation, skimming, group rewriting processes, ending in a single document for every student/group containing all information deemed pertaining, necessary and sufficient to describe the subject
3. choosing key-words and mind-mapping
   
4. assigning key-words to students and writing of individual encyclopedic entries about key-word
5. wiki population with
   
1. texts
2. images and graphic elements
3. links according to the mind-map and more
   
6. reading and mutual peer editing of the encyclopedic entries
7. self-assessment about the quality of own work, teacher's assessment about the quality of work, classwork on contents with a questionnaire about appreciation

From a scientific point of view, this should only be the beginning of a methodologic process that should lead to experimental verification in lab of the explanations found to the phenomena.

For me, it is anyway a starting point. The interesting thing that I want to share are the results of the appreciation questionnaire. The question was:

Question 3: With the wiki activity we worked in quite an unusual way: try to balance the books about this methodology, expressing in particular your opinion about:
a) is it or is it not useful to learn more (and, in case, which kind of thigs can you learn better and which can you learn worse?)
b) is it or is it not useful to motivate you to study
c) which aspects of this work do you find more positive and which more critical
d) suggestions, various thoughts, your ideas about what we have done.

The results are interesting. 37 students took part. The answers were free and of various length, some following the scheme, other more original. Here is a summary of the answers.

Pros

• you can learn ICT (32)
• you can learn physics (22)
• it makes studying physics light (21)
• you get motivation from the fact that you are creating something (20)
• you learn to use the net in order to study and learn (14)
• you get to cooperate with your school mates, even when they live far away (14)
• it's different (13)
• you can go in depth with unknown words and concepts (10)
• you learn a method of work that will be useful in future (8)
• you share ideas (8)
• you are forced to pay attention to the connections between concepts (8)
• you reach plenty of specific and detailed information (7)
• you get motivated by using computers and the net (6)
• you can study in a creative and constructive way (5)
• you learn to cooperate (5)
• it facilitates theoretical learning (5)
• working so much on shared information you get to understand its contents (4)
• the product grows with everybody's contribution (4)
• it's accessible everywhere and always (3)
• you get to interact directly and at any time with the teacher (2)
• it makes your school innovative (2)
• you become curious about the final result (2)
• you are responsible of what you write (2)
• you produce your own studying materials (2)
• you can work alone or in a group (2)
• you improve the net (2)
• you learn how to evaluate and improve your and other mates' work (2)
• you share working methods (1)
• it motivates students who like working in groups and share (1)
• you get to use the school's ICT labs (1)
• you don't write with a pen but on a keyboard (1)
• you learn to express yourself in an appropriate way (1)
• it's easier than learning on books (1)
• it forces you to read everybody's work (1)

Cons

• it's difficult if you don't have a computer or an internet connection at home, or if the schools computers are slow or malfunctioning (16)
• technically editing isn't too easy (5)
• sometimes the information you find is not correct or appropriate or adequate or reliable (4)
• some can work more and others less, coordinating is not always easy (2)
• working in the PC room is distracting (2)
• sometimes you end working alone anyway (1)
• little practical learning (1)
• there's a risk that someone's contributions are mishandled by others (1)
• you go in too little depth regarding physics (1)
• someone can be unable to study on a PC (1)
• the topic wasn't interesting (1)
• you learn well your own contribution but not the others' (1)
• not enough time to absorb the contents (1)

Suggestions

• work like this more frequently (30)
• use this method in other subjects or topics (4)
• make the wikis accessible to everyone, not only to our classes (3)
• keep changing groups (2)
• build a social network (1)
• build a gaming site (1)
• improve graphics (1)
• the school should provide tools for everyone to have an experience like this (1)
• choose better topics (1)
• insert exercises (1)
• insert summaries (1)
• insert lesson notes (1)
• use IM services (1)

Feels like it's a good first time. Although I have some corrections and steerings to think of for the next time. In a next post I'll focus on these.

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