I’ve just finished conducting two interviews as part of my final year project, and they were incredible, really really positive.
I should give a quick summary first of what has gone before: I’m looking at using wikis in a learning environment, to investigate how useful they are I wanted to run a course where the learners use wikis in some key way. With some help from my supervisor I set up some wikis within Moodle (the OLE that the uni use) for this year’s second years to use throughout their first two design projects. The first one was a bit of a headache, it was the first time they’d done anything like it, I was out at school and wasn’t really able to support them, and perhaps the nature of the project didn’t really match up with what was expected of them.
The second project went much better in many ways. Their task was to split into groups of 4/5 then pick two designers and investigate their differing approaches to form/function then present their findings. Each group was given a wiki to use with the encouragement that they put all their findings on there and use the space to collaboratively filter out the relevant bits, with the hope that the way they would do that would require/prompt discussion and help them develop their opinions, and in turn help them learn by making them construct meaning around their findings.
My interviews today were with two people from the same group, I don’t think I can really quote them here just yet because of the Faculty’s ethical procedures, but the gist from both of them was that they found it to be incredibly useful and that they would love the opportunity to be able to do it with other projects. There was such enthusiasm for what they had been doing, it was pretty heartening to hear that these wikis hadn’t just been viewed as another loop for them to jump through and that it had actually helped them. The feedback I’ve been getting from other interviews and questionnaires has been on the whole positive but I have been given the feeling that most of them wanted to take a very tactical approach (which is to be expected from second year uni students) to the projects and the wikis made this quite difficult. I’ll no doubt write more about this in the weeks to come but I’ll finish off with this:
One interviewee basically said that it became addictive, they kept checking back to see what had been added, if anyone had added an opinion about what other people had written, if there was anything new there that would help them understand more… As an aside I asked him if he had heard of feeds to which he said he had but didn’t really know much about them, I briefly explained what they were and I could see his eyes light up with ideas. It was a good feeling to share something like that with some one who was grateful to hear it!
[tags]finalyearproject, wikis, feeds[/tags]
