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.

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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Who's afraid of ICT?

One of the big electoral slogans, here in Italy a few years ago, was about the "three I's" ("inglese, informatica, impresa", English, ICT, enterprise) to be injected in our schools, something many teachers (including myself) considered either ludicrous or scary, according to the moment.

Probably we are there again. So we'd better deal with it.

One of the three "I's" was ICT. Why should we find it ludicrous or scary?

Let me state my starting point, so that I am not misunderstood: I consider the main part of my teaching profession to be helping students to develop some behaviours that are transversal to the subjects I teach, but which, thanks to these subjects, can be learned by the students. Here I am talking about things like: critical attitude, curiosity for culture, autonomous learning, introjecting universal values, consistency with said values, ability to listen, cooperate, interact hierarchically... Such little things. And I used the adjective "main" to mean that I belong to a school of thought for which if a student develops these behaviours but is not capable of integrating a rational function, I am very happy all the same. Maybe I can't grade him very high, but nonetheless he will be quite aware of my esteem for him.

Well, starting with this, why doesn't the "I" of ICT scare me? As a matter of fact, I am not convinced of the absolute usefulness of ICT in learning maths and physics: I am a bit of a traditional guy here. But I am convinced that I can use ICT to build critical attitude, curiosity for culture, and so on and so on.

Paradoxically, sponsoring a frontal attack of ICT in schools can mean that a technicist education prevails, based on notions and work-oriented more than person-oriented, but it can also mean its exact contrary. Easily. As usually, reforms travel on the legs of those who work in the field, and tools are ambivalent. If students will have less "cultural" subjects classes, if they meet the right teachers, they will also have more classes where culture pass through more modern media. And, who knows, perhaps students will be more attracted to it.

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Building learning communities

In Sarah Weisz's TEN blog I found a post that caused some reflections. Building professional learning communities simply tells about Will Richardson's idea that many teachers don't understand how technologies can facilitate learning, and invites to join a discussion opened by a TEN member in the site forum.

Is it really so in Italy? Don't many teachers realize about the potentials?

With some effort (VERY ironic here) I think I could agree, even if maybe things are changing a little. The effort that is being made in introducing technologies in didactics is certainly big. What are the obstacles?

• Teachers feel unprepared to use computers (and probably many of them really are);
• teachers feel unprepared to use ICT in the classroom (and certainly many of them really are);
• teachers feel introducing technologies as something "more", not as a different way of thinking and doing;
• teachers have no clues about what can be done with technologies, because they don't know them and don't practice it;
  
• teachers are focused on syllabuses, abilities students must reach (for tradition or to pass the final exam) and don't have any time nor will to try anything new;
• teachers have no will to try anything new;
• teachers have no will.

I believe that the first step is to show teachers that doing something is possible. Show them finite products, even if the quality is not supreme, to let them know what it's all about. I think it's up to the curious ones, to those like me, to open the way so that in our Italian schools something new is tried, if it's worth it.

And I want to underline this element of prudence: if it's worth it. Experimenting is always a little game on our student's heads, and it doesn't mean improvising, and above all it means having the intellectual honesty to admit when something hasn't worked.

I am trying to do something. The project is going on, although, between election days and new labs to be baptized, we slowed down a little. Our next step is to publish the wikis...
I am also using a wiki to prepare an environmental education project in cooperation with other schools nearby. I hope it works. If nothing else, some more people will know that wikis exist.

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OECD and schooling

Translation of today's post "L'OCSE e la scuola" on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) published in 2001 and then republished more recently a document that's quite interesting because it tries to describe the possible scenarios for the future of schooling.

The scenarios described are six, divided in three categories: "Status quo", "Re-schooling" and "De-schooling".

Obviously anyone is free to get his or her own idea about these. From a quick check, I think the de-schooling is more appreciated in the USA.

Personally I find myself more on the reschoolng lines, although I am aware that the real outcome will depend locally on many factors and will probably be a hybrid among the different scenarios

The Status quo model seems to me invariably the Italian sentence, among half reforms attempted by a government and punctually erased by the next one...     

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Del.icio.us

Translation of post "Del.icio.us" of March 22nd 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. It puts together all the "favourites" of the subscribers, it recombines them, it makes statistics of them... it draws a map of the net based on the preferences of those who contribute.

In Patricia Donaghy's blog there is a good screencast (actually, once you see one, you get another dozen) about how to build a network of contacts and widen one's webliography with del.icio.us.

How does it work? Every time I bookmark a website, this is added to my page. When I look at this page I see the list of my favourite web sites, but I also see that, for example, website such is also a favourite site of 20 other people. Not only: of each of them I can see the whole list of favourites and how he/she organized them. So maybe I find out that one of these has the same interests I have, and among his favourite websites has some that I already know, but surely also many more that I haven't seen yet. So I take advantage of somebody else's experience not to surf randomly, somebody else who has something in common with me.

So I can also add this person to my network. If I look at 'my network' page I see the names of those I chose as "interests neighbours", but I also see all their favourites, from the most recent to the least. I can also be useful to my network's members: when i discover a website I'm not really interested in (if I am interested directly, I just bookmark it and my network mates will see it anyway), but I know that somebody in my network could find this site interesting, I can forward it to him directly through del.icio.us.

Charmed by this thing, I immediately tried. From the first one of my "faves" three network members sprang out and three more faves to add... Looks like a fruitful way of knowing people and resources, and a timesaver too.

Let's think of using it in a class, for example during an online quest. The students can optimize times (obviously if enough motivated) and create each his or her own network of URL's, they will organize and use at leisure...

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An educational bloggers' directory

Translation of post "Una rubrica di siti educativi" of March 22nd 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".



Patricia Donaghy, author of a very interesting blog where she shows useful tools for the educational web 2.0, wrote to me about an educational blog directory.

Of course I joined Edubloggerdir with the first Italian blog, Il deserto dei tartari 2.0.

I am working a lot these days trying to find as much information as possible and blog it here. It is always true that rearranging my ideas on my own is always a good practice, but two heads work better than one, so... let's get networked!