Week 2 | Moodle reflection on learning - mobile phones wiki

Source: Google images

The forum is reflective of Connectivism. This learning style are specialised nodes or information sources, where learning occurs through a network, is social, and technologically enhanced, and recognises and interprets patterns. Influencing factors include a diversity of networks. From the memory connectivism recognises adaptive patterns representative of current states existing in networks. 
The participation of the mobile phone activity means that we as learners, used De Bono's thinking hats as a way to tap into our prior knowledges and understandings to produce required information, which is then added to the social technological network (the wiki) to produce an array of suggestions to the question. Learning is enhanced by augmentation, a substitution tool with minimal learning improvement.

What are the characteristics of the wiki design that lead you to that understanding?
Wikis are information sources. Pages are editable in a technical network that allow users to collaborate with each other in the sharing of information. Connectivism occurs because learning is through the wiki network, which is a social network. Other users that have access to these pages can add/change or delete information posted by either themselves or by others. Wiki's are able to connect to other networks such as facebook, blogging sites and websites to share information and ideas to produce specialised nodes of information. 

Reflect on your own personal participation in the wiki.

I found the wiki to be enjoyable, but challenging also. Using De Bono's thinking hats as a tool for prompting the thought process was new to me, even though I am familiar with them. The challenge was to extradite information from my memory to add suggestions to each question the hat asked.

What are the benefits, issues, drawbacks of participating in a wiki like this? Participating in this wiki uncovered benefits, issues and drawbacks. One of the benefits I found was that information was easily visible to all connected users. In one page I could compare, add and confirm my thoughts about the given topic. This helped to understand how the information should be displayed and when I ran out of memory knowledge for some of the questions. The main issue with this wiki was that you could delete other users information if you were not watching. This is a concern as information would be missing and could therefore be incorrect. A drawback is that all users have the same colour text and if using this as a collaborative tool, would be difficult to identify who is who. The colour change option is also difficult if you are lacking code knowledge, as that is the only way to change font colour if text is highlighted.  How would it contribute to the learning of your students? 

Source: Google images

Student's learning would be enhanced through the efficiency that this framework provides. It would prepare student's transitions into other technologies which would lead into the transformation level of SAMR technological model.

How did the scaffold support the collection of a range of perspectives?  Using De Bonos thinking hats provided an effective scaffolding tool as it gave the thoughts and ideas I had formed, a direction. Blooms taxonomy is fantastic to produce next level thinkers, however unless those questions are embedded or directed into a framework or, they provide inadequate learning for students. The thinking hats work in two ways, they provide a brain stimulate, in the form of colours (black, red, green, yellow, white & blue) and imagery (the hats), which research is showing, produces a higher, effective and foundationally sophisticated student.  

Source: Google images