Pedagogy 2.0

I was very excited to read about wikis this week, as I really have no background in these at all except to deplore my students' reliance on Wikipedia as the ultimate authority on all things academic.  The possibilities for wikis as a tool in the classroom at all levels are great, particularly in the light of the constructivist views with which our class texts are certainly enamored.  As an undergraduate student, I felt that allowing students to construct meaning for themselves with guidance from the teacher was by far to be preferred as a method of teaching to the assembly line approach of spouting interpretations from a podium while students frantically take notes (or doodle in the margins).

My most successful pedagogical experiments have always been those in which students created the contexts for learning themselves.  Collaboration is a completely natural way for today's students to approach learning and they are confused about the concepts of original thought and plagiarism.  They feel that if the information is "out there" it is available to be used as a stepping stone to reach a higher level of understanding and that it is in no way "stealing" to do so.  If schools could just overcome the legal and financial obstacles to make wiki construction widely available and understood by educators, these learning tools could be invaluable to the learning process. 

In the state of Indiana, at least, the emphasis is not on specific content knowledge (in English classes), but on skills and critical thinking.  Wikis provide a natural way to achieve both types of objectives.  Students will, by nature of the medium, spend large amounts of time in the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (synthesis and evaluation), rather than being passively dragged as high up the ladder as their teachers can force them via essay questions and class discussions.  Furthermore, the ownership the students have in their writing will ensure that they contribute, edit, and revise. They will see immediate value in their work for the edification of other students and will be excited when outsiders comment or ask questions.  I agree with Beach et al. in Teaching Writing when they say that "knowledge is constructed through a collaborative sharing of ideas (71).  As a teacher, I cannot take knowledge from myself and put it in students; rather, they have to start with prior knowledge of their own and build connections between texts, discussions, and research to build up that knowledge.

Learning to work collaboratively with peers is a difficult skill to teach and to learn, but one that is absolutely vital for today's students who wish to enter the workforce prepared for what they must do there.  The common complaints that are listed in Teaching Writing on page 72 are ones that I am very familiar with and are voiced by students, parents, counselors, and even teachers.  In particular the distrust of their peers' abilities and senses of responsibility to create good work are difficult to resolve.  Although teachers can do what Beach et al. suggest, to create mixed-ability groups, students recognize these groupings for what they are and often resent their role in the group, whether as high-achiever or struggling learner.  This is a difficult hurdle to jump and assignments must be carefully crafted to ensure fairness and reasonable expectations of all students.

Although students may resent collaborative assignments for the reasons in Teaching Writing just as Jody Shipka's students were flabbergasted by her assignments in "This was NOT an easy assignment," these tasks foster critical thinking at every hyperlink and every sidebar.  As student Josh Hibon noted regarding his wiki assignment, "I would have written a similar paper [to the blog], but it would have one with a biased perspective of what I thought about it, but getting their perspectives led to different conclusions" (Beach 88).  Traditional academic thought would perceive the change in Josh's opinion as the result of plagiarism because the new views would have been expressed as his own, but in reality, Josh has done what we all wish our students to do: he has researched the idea and discovered that his previous opinions were no longer valid given the evidence and was able to articulate the how and why of his changed opinion.

As regards McLoughlin and Lee's article, "Future Learning Landscapes, I found that their opinions are in line with the other authors we have read in terms of subscription to the social constructivist ideology.  On one point I did disagree, however.  I do not believe that students feel that educators who use sites like Facebook lose credibility.  Perhaps this was an attitude at the time of the study in 2007, but I have not encountered that feeling from students at all.  Perhaps it was more true of professors at the college level rather than high school teachers.  I do agree that "students may perceive instructors' attempts to co-opt such social technologies for educational purposes as intrusions into their space."  I would prefer to start with multimodal composition, publishing via YouTube and wikis rather than to jump right into Facebook or MySpace.  Although these tools have potential, there are so many tools available that above all, teachers must keep in mind the goals they are trying to achieve and the skills they wish to teach.  The digital tools must be shaped to fit the instructional objectives, not the other way around.

Overall, this week's readings made me want to get started right away with a wiki!  I can see multiple applications and now that I better understand what they are and how they can be used, I am eager to try!