Graham Wegner - Open Educator

The four MYLU classes have been coming to grips with the PBL wiki where we have been storing all of the learning “artifacts” of our unit on “What Does It Mean To Be Australian?” As they have gone about their task, I have been discovering quite a bit about what wikis can do and just as importantly, what they can’t do. Bear in mind that this is about 120 users working and making page edits over a 3 day period each week. So it’s not your usual wiki project - it’s a bit of an experiment - but please note the following.

• All images uploaded must have unbroken file names - no extra period or spaces, kids normally name files like Aussie Inventions.jpg and forget to use an underscore to link the words.

• Each image uploaded must have a unique name - a child from Learning Area 21 who uploads an image named Aussie.jpg on Wednesday comes back a week later to find their image looks different because the kid from Learning Area 22 uploaded another image and chose that same exact file name on Friday.

• Two people can’t work on the same page at the same time on two different computers. It doesn’t work! I originally thought it would.

• Images linked to at home display as desired but can be blocked by the filter at school resulting in those ugly “This image cannot be displayed ” boxes.

• Kids are shocking with passwords and requesting an e-mail remainder doesn’t always work.

Apart from those few things, we (students, teachers, me!) have learnt a lot about how wikis work and whether they are a good vehicle to unpack Australian Identity on. We certainly boost wikispaces traffic on certain days peaking at No.2 for page edits (currently  number four today - see graphic) last Thursday. A few weeks to go and it will be interesting to see if it all becomes on unreadable, unnavigable mess or a relevant document on our learning open to the world.

During the latter half of last week, we started our Problem Based Learning program with the Middle Years Learning Unit (MYLU) students. As our teacher-librarian was away in Melbourne at a PBL conference, it was decided to get the students started familiarising and using the cutting edge technology of the wiki before the introduction of the problem. Each class had approximately two hours in the computing room with me and Peter, our extra support teacher for the term. I had already set up the PBL wiki ready to go (or so I thought) with all of the relevant pages set up - the problem, Learning Area pages, sandbox pages, examples, information about wikis and even a link to a Copyright page for kids (poached from Doug Noon’s del.icio.us links). I had my plan, use the IWB in the classroom to explicitly walk the kids through the wiki, discuss what a wiki was, touch on the aspects of adding “stuff” to a wiki - text, images, wiki links, outgoing links, navigation, creating pages. I also tried to explicitly show the kids how to join Wikispaces, go to the PBL wiki and request membership to that space. I first worked with my own class although Natalie (my co-teacher) was officially in charge and they had already played with a wiki in a previous lesson. So that went OK - Nat is a very web-savvy teacher and got the kids easily into acquiring space membership and then we tackled the section of the session designed to give them real opportunity to acquire some skills. I had concocted an Internet Treasure Hunt with a page dedicated to it on the wiki where the kids had to track some various web items and put them on their page - links, images, slabs of information. Away they went with varying success. I had also cunningly made all of the items to be tracked of Australian origin so that the kids would already be tuned when we started the problem. I also figured that as I started each new session, my delivery of the lesson and concepts would be smoother and the kids later in the week would be able to get going quicker and achieve more in the two hours. How wrong I was. The spread of wiki-awareness across all of the classes was extremely wide with some of the youngest students being the quickest to create accounts, read the instructions, create their own team page for the Hunt and add content while a lot of the Year Sevens were a bit lost. I also learnt a fair bit about wikis as we went along. For instance, two people can’t have a page open for editing and work at the same time because the changes don’t update on the fly and whatever is on the page when the SAVE button is hit, it is what is saved on that version. I think it will smooth out as the students gain confidence and they spread the tasks and work on more than just one page at once in their group.
In the three classes that hadn’t worked with me before, very few kids had even heard of a wiki and it was interesting that not one of my fellow teachers knew how Wikipedia was constructed. I certainly raised their awareness and I am sure that they will use Wikipedia with a different frame of mind in future. It all depends on your view on “trusted sources” but the kids were really great in identifying the advantages of the Wikipedia system - always up-to-date, links to other resources, many more articles and interactive multi-media extras.
So, in the end, all of the students registered as wikispace users (using net safety aliases, of course) became members of the PBL wiki, created a team page for the Hunt, linked that page back to their Learning Area navigation page and made a start on the Treasure Hunt. It certainly was obvious that the kids and the teachers need more “play time” using this new tool before it is used for the solving of the Problem but I am glad that everyone feels that using a wiki has great potential.
I have to finish with this great little anecdote. In one class, the numbers were odd so one boy had to pair up with his teacher to create a team. That was great - the teacher felt it gave her a chance to get into the task, learn the application and get to know her student a little better. The student? He was fine BUT he was concerned that he was at a disadvantage because he had a teacher as a partner and she might not pull her weight!!

Over the past couple of weeks I have been really delving into wikis and setting a couple up for classes at my school to use. It was timely that James announced the edublogs.org partnership with wikispaces because that is the host for several of the wikis currently on the go. I’m also co-authoring a wiki with fellow South Oz edublogger Al for a joint presentation and we have this one at seedwiki. Currently, seedwiki is free from our South Australian schools internet filter system while wikispaces is blocked hence the reason for our choice. Al believes strongly that for teachers in our system to have a go at using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom, there needs to be as few barriers as possible including not having to deal with filters. I concur (sort of) but I think educators should also have access to the best free tools available and there won’t be any shift in filter policy on edublogs or wikispaces if the powers that be can point and say, “No-one in our system wants to use them anyway.” We’ll agree to disagree.
I haven’t really gotten into wikis much before this year even though I have been aware of their potential. I just haven’t had a really good purpose and we all know purpose drives learning. So, at the moment I have a personal wiki with nothing on it, the MYLU wiki for our presentation at the Middle Schooling Conference which is starting to take shape and one for our Problem Based Learning program. I was originally trying to combine the MYLU wiki with the PBL so that at the conference we could showcase the program. But as I started adding pages and content, I realised that the two couldn’t work together, especially as I wanted the PBL section to be driven by student input. So, I have come to the conclusion that for me, a wiki has to have a singular purpose.

Throughout this term, I have been working with four classes in the middle primary years. Our problem was based around the recent Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne and with the help of our teacher-librarian, we designed the unit of work over an eight week period. With students aged from seven to nine years in this group, we tried to keep the problem simple.

You’ve been selected to represent Australia at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. You have been asked to produce a digital story telling about your preparation and participation in Melbourne.

We used the process outlined in TSOF’s Problem Based Learning steps and the kids grappled with extracting key words (with varying degrees of success), using print and online resources (set up a del.icio.us account to make tracking useful websites a lot easier) and downloading images as they strove to solve their problem. We used the free (but not open source) Photo Story program from Microsoft for their final presentations and overall, the students did a pretty good job. They loved using the software and found that easy to manipulate. A harder task was ensuring that their research sentences made it onto their digital stories and that relevant images were able to be found and included. I tried hard to find Creative Commons licensed images but that proved to be really difficult with some of the less popular sports so I had to use the “fair use” component of using copyrighted material for educational purposes so that the kids had access to enough photos to make the idea work. However, if I want to post a link to an example here on this blog, I will have to find one that used exclusively Creative Commons images - the one sport that did have Flickr based images with the appropriate permissions was the triathlon which was the only sport open to the Melbourne public for free. That would explain the plentiful images. Other events like the road races in cycling and the marathon in athletics had free access for spectators. On a final note, it was frustrating that our education system’s internet filter blocked out any reference to boxing including the little icon used to illustrate the different events. I had to unblock sites so that kids could access needed and appropriate material. I suppose it is dangerous for our students to know about this sport.

Photo by PDR - MCG panorama (Commonwealth Games 2006)

With our first PBL unit succesfully completed, we met with the next group of teachers to plan the next installment for next term. This time we are working with the MYLU students and the expectations change when you are planning for middle school students. Our general theme this time is “What does it mean to be Australian?” We had a half day release to plan for this on Tuesday and have based the problem around a famous Australian song released just before the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations called “We Are Australian.” (Link via Wikipedia entry.) The students will have the job of creating and justifying new verses to this famous (for Aussies) song but I’m still undecided on how the learning could be documented and presented. I am tempted to use wikis where the students work in pairs to first dissect an existing verse by hyperlinking key phrase and words to sources and images on the web that explain them and adding their own reflections in as well. One of the teachers is keen for them to use Photo Story as well and maybe that might be OK as the way to show off the completed verse but PBL is about more than the completed product. I might have to play around a bit with a wiki over the holiday break we have coming up to see if my ideas will fly - however, I am working with teachers (and this is not a criticism) who are not at all familiar with how a wiki works. I think they would rather have the kids record their digital notes in Word but maybe it’s my responsibility to expand the horizons a bit here. Dean certainly did in a counter reply to a comment I placed on his blog recently. In fact, I would be pushing the old story and continuing to do “old things in new ways.”

Via my boss, this link to Illinios Maths & Science Academy titled Designing Developing a PBL Unit. Very good at breaking down the process into manageable steps. Thanks, Ann.

As I read more and start thinking about the year ahead, I find that the blogs engaging my brain are quite different from my original Top Five list. Leigh Blackall would still be there as his posts really challenge - even though he is based in a different sector of Aussie education to me, his thoughts are always relevant. I certainly admire his “say it as I see it” style and wish I could inject more of that into my own blogging.
But the two blogs that keep hitting my relevance button are NZ’s own Artichoke and Doug Noon’s Borderland. Part of my role here at my school is the implementation of a Problem Based Learning program. I consider myself to be one of those creative types who can set up meaningful and engaging learning experienes but documenting along the way and really assessing what the children have learnt. So this year my partner in crime, our teacher-librarian, have resolved to get the model right with time set aside to plan with teachers, following closely the PBL model we have chosen, allowing students enough time to solve the problem and tying it all together with a meaningful assessment of the solutions and the skills and standards displayed along the way. So, in timely blogosphere fashion, Artichoke’s post about inquiry learning really got me questioning about the effectiveness of my previous PBL units and what I could possibly do now in the initial stages to get it right. I don’t really want any of the classes I’ll be working with to be lost in a tunnel of goats. Artichoke points out:

Inquiry learning is an attempt to get students involved in Chris’ “work that matters” or “work that cuts it”.

So what would meet that criteria? Is a problem that gets kids to design a pamphlet or website warning citizens of Adelaide what to do if a bushfire/tsunami/earthquake struck going to “cut it” or is it roleplay beyond the maturity of a primary school aged student? Or does the problem have to focus on what our students could realistically have some influence on - how could we support a refugee child starting at our school? Maybe both ideas are valid. But Artichoke has already done some of the research hackwork for me and summarised a solid consideration to take on board when we meet to discuss and design:

It was only when the problem oriented learning activity required students to compare and contrast quite different cases; to look for similarities and differences across dissimilar and apparently unrelated problems that students showed transfer of knowledge and dramatic learning gains resulting from the activity.

One post back on Artichoke’s blog, I find a potential starting point for our middle school students. How about a re-mix of the final paragraph?

I might start with explorations of Search Engines. And reckon Blogbar the free search engine bar you can include in your own blog or website will be useful in that it is going to allow students (remix insert) to easily play with, and compare a range of major search engines [Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Exalead], and major blog search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! Blog Search, IceRocket, Blogpulse, Feedster, and Del.icio.us.] And I think I might follow up with explorations of The Question.

The question could be something along the lines of, “Which search engine easily and efficiently produces the most accurate and meaningful results?” From this question stems many other subsidiary Jamie McKenzie style questions that can be covered either explicitly or by investigation and students are (hopefully) gaining relevant and necessary information literacy skills by exploring the way that information is delivered to them.
However our first cohort of students for this term’s PBL program are much younger (Years 2 - 4 / 8 & 9 year olds) so the planning and thinking has to be different and provide much more support.
So where am I going with all of this? I’m not too sure but fast forward to Borderland where Doug has extracted his own useful take on Artichoke’s observations.

Artichoke questioned the uncritical application of inquiry approaches to classroom learning, and recommended that teachers introduce relational and extended abstract thinking challenges into inquiry tasks. She left a link to an article called Using the SOLO Taxonomy that I found useful for answering a problem I’ve been pondering for about 9 years. The article provides a framework for teaching to levels of thinking that are appropriate to a student’s specific background and needs. The SOLO taxonomy defines levels of learning competence for students. With Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in mind, maybe I can use this model to find challenges that are just right for my students.

This is the great thing about blogging. We all interpret written language from our point of view - so I might read Artichoke’s post and go, “Aha, that’s what she’s on about!” But Doug has pulled alternative meaning from the same post and reading his post Herding Goats helps me to see and read the original post in a new light. And by following the link to the SOLO taxonomy, I now have a great tool to assess the quality of the students’ solutions to the set problem without being dazzled or disappointed by their use of ICT’s in the research or presentation side of the PBL process. I’m taking this along to the planning session on Friday as well as the process. I’ll post here after the planning session. And Arti and Doug, I’d appreciate your uncensored thoughts - now, then, anytime.