foolfillment: the blog

With only a few days left before the start of the new term it’s time to come back here and write something new. It’s hard to believe it’s been so long since my last post. Needless to say I’ve been busy at school, but next term things should return to something more like normal again, and you should also begin to see more activity on the Ross High CDT blog.

One thing I have been meaning to post about has been the fantastic start that my friend Krysia Mrs Smyth has made with her first year class at St Luke’s. Towards the end of the term there was a flurry of posts, written by the class, all about the projects that they have been working on.

This sort of thing is what I had really hoped to be able to do at Ross High. The excuse I’ve been using I suppose has been ‘I don’t have the time’ - the same excuse that I’ve argued against in the past. Truth is I really don’t know how I will fit class blogging into my classes, there isn’t space in the timetable in 1st year, especially when I lose my class a lot from Monday holidays, and with doing Standard Grades in S2 and S3, again I feel like it is a race against time to get the students prepared for their exams. Another obstacle to class blogging, and I mean real class blogging where the pupils do it not me, is that I am in workshops most of the time and getting access to the graphics room - and internet - is a rare occurrence. My other class, an S4 Graphics Higher/Int2 course over 2 years should be giving my loads of chance for class blogging, but the obstacle there is the pupils themselves - they aren’t so keen on sharing their work online, something that I’m going to badger them about. I know there are a couple of S4s who know about this blog, so maybe they can spread the word?

One final thing, Nick Hood, physics teacher and all round good guy, has closed down his wiki after it being blocked in his school.

I’ve also found that skills in “ICT” are so threatening for some in education that they have been a distinct career disadvantage for me. For this reason, I am not going to waste my time on these things I cannot use to advantage me or my students.

This is a huge shame, Nick had put a huge amount of his own time and effort into his wiki and previously VLE. That he has been left feeling he has no choice but to abandon it I think is appalling. I find myself feeling equally frustrated sometimes, using ICT in the classroom comes with a large number of advantages, often just using the usual stuff on your PC is enough. However it is so much better when you have control over your system and can configure it to work for you - something you can’t do with the locked down school systems; then when you find yourself some great software while using your machine at home you are fighting a losing battle, trying to use your machine at school is not worthwhile (you can’t get on the network) and trying to get software installed on your school machine is often not worth the effort (takes too long to get a licence, get it installed, or the machine doesn’t have a good enough spec). Why should teachers with the expertise to run their own machines, to securely set up a good productive working system (or run a webserver in the case of many teachers) not be granted privileges to either use their own machine on the network, or to tweak their work machines to suit them? On a related note, why should pupils not get similar rights?

I’ve been quiet here for a while (how many times have I started a blog post like that?) but it’s now the end of the October break and I’m ready to get back to school.

I thought I’d write a little about things that I’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks. In my last post I linked to a few things that I was going to try with my S4 Graphics class, the lesson itself went fine but a few things happened as a result of using some social web tools that surprised and disappointed me. My over-riding feeling to came out of it and other related events was that at Ross High we aren’t doing enough to prepare our pupils for the world where everyone has an audience, everyone is a contributor, and everyone leaves a trail.

I really wanted to get along to the Internet Safety training event at Musselburgh Grammar School that Ollie Bray ran. While I didn’t manage to make it Neil Winton thankfully did. He wrote about the evening and has since also flagged up a few things I’d like to take into school tomorrow and talk to people about. I know that there are Ross parents hoping for a similar evening to be run for them.

This morning I made the time to watch Ewan McIntosh’s keynote from the ULearn07 conference. Once again there was lots to think over, but this time it was the idea of fear of failure, and over-planning. I’m going in to school tomorrow with a renewed enthusiasm to try some new things without the fear that I think I’ve been trapped by in the first part of this term (if I can’t try some new things when I’m on 0.7 will I find the time when I get a 1FTE contract) and I’m going to try and show off a few ideas to other teachers in the department to see if they can take them somewhere further.

As I’ve completed my final year project at last I’ve decided to make it available here as PDF file. Perhaps this is foolish!

Feel free to have a look, but bear in mind this is my first piece of research.

Collaborative Wikis for University Students (PDF 1039kb)
Abstract: Wikis are opening up exciting opportunities for collaborative learning. This study looks at a group of university students using wikis as part of their group-based design course to see if there are any benefits. What is found is the importance of treating wikis as a new technology and creating new tasks instead of using them as a modern alternative to more traditional learning methods. Also striking is the sense of ownership that the students felt over their own work, and the importance that face to face communication plays in developing understanding despite having access to wikis.

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]