DeBono's Thinking Hats wiki

My reflections on the DeBono's thinking hats wiki activity ....

 

Is this forum reflective of Behaviourism, constructivism, cognitivism, connectivism? One, or all of the above? What are the characteristics of the wiki design that lead you to that understanding?

I feel that this wiki activity was not overly reflective of Behaviourism or Cognitivism.  Behaviourism describes learning as a task that has a set answer/outcome, and is usually a repeated process until the skill/knowledge becomes automatic (Mergel, 1998).  Hopefully one day working in wikis will become an automatic process for me, but I think I need alot more repeated exposure to them for that to happen!

Behaviorism measures learning success based on achieving set objectives, and the learner participates quite passively (Mergel, 1998).  The Behaviourist theory is a teacher centred approach.  This is very different to this wiki activity as apart from scaffolding the activity, the teacher had little or no input.  She allowed the learners to search for answers themselves, provide their own opinions and thoughts, and to collaborate with their fellow students to enhance learning. Unlike Behaviorism, there was no right or wrong answer to this wiki activity, and there was no repetition or rote learning of knowledge (however, there was repetition of using the wiki, thus learning the skill of using a wiki). 

While Cognitivism is learner centred, this theory is not a good reflection of this wiki activity either.  Cognitivism is focused on how information is structured in the mind, and the process by which new learning is transferred from the sensory register to short term memory to long term memory (Fasso, 2013).  In Cogitivism, a large mass of information is presented at once, and depending on the relevance of the information, and the learner’s schema, only a small amount of this information will be transferred to short term then long term memory (Fasso, 2013).  There was no information presented in this wiki activity, only scaffolding to encourage a wide range of perspectives.  Unlike Cognitivism, this wiki activity did not require learners to code and represent knowledge or to store and retrieve information (Mergel, 1998). 

The wiki activity, however, did have elements of both Constructivism and Connectivism.  Constructivism components that were utilised in the wiki activity included each learner using their pre-existing knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs as the foundation to build and expand new knowledge and skills (Moursund, 2005).  The amount of pre-existing knowledge learners brought to the wiki activity seemed to vary depending on how much time they had spent in a classroom.  Those that had spent considerable amount of time in a classroom recently were able to anecdotally tell of the current mobile phone usage situation at schools.  I found the white thinking hat to be very valuable for this, as I have not spent a lot of time in the classroom, so did not know first hand the prevalence of mobile phone usage.  It was interesting to compare the ABS data with the anecdotal information, as they seemed to be quite conflicting.  The ABS data estimated 31% of children in Australia had mobile phones, however, those with classroom experience felt it was nearly 100% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009).  The ABS data, however, was collected in 2009, and there may have been issues with response rate etc.  In line with the Constructivism learning theory, I found this learning to be very ‘messy’.  Seeing how the problem would fit in the ‘real world’, the online social interaction and collaboration meant that there were many ideas and concepts (and text) all included into each thinking hat.  I think that to move forward from this wiki activity (if we did want to make a decision or conclusion about the use of mobile phones in the classroom), a collaborated, coordinated session would be required to draw out the themes from each hat. 

One element of Connectivism that was used in this wiki activity was that the teacher did not provide learners with all the knowledge to answer the problem.   Rather, the teacher assisted us, through scaffolding, to connect information sources, collaborate with our peers and to build online networks.    Collaborating in this wiki activity included reading, commenting, analysing and adding to the previous wiki posts so that there was a pool of information that had come from many heads, rather than one.  There was no right or wrong answer to this wiki activity, but focused more on the journey that we took to gather the information, attitudes and thoughts using the six thinking hats.  This reflective tool is also part of this ‘journey’, as a way to think about the process and how it relates to the learning theories (rather than whether we got the answer right or wrong).  In fact, there was no definitive answer to the problem at all in this wiki!  As mentioned above, I think for a decision to be made around mobile phone use in classrooms, the teachers role may be to help learners look for patterns and to assist with critically evaluating the sources cited in the posts (like the ABS data on mobile phone ownership).  This would help learners make an informed decision and provide future steps as to whether mobiles should be used in the classroom.

 

Reflect on your own personal participation in the wiki. What are the benefits, issues, drawbacks of participating in a wiki like this? How would it contribute to the learning of your students?

This was the second time I have participated in a wiki (the first time was last week with the blog address wiki).  I have to say, I did not enjoy the wiki today.  I had many technical issues, including my wiki contributions not saving, the wiki site not responding (and hence closing the webpage window automatically, even though I was mid typing), and potential issues with overwriting fellow learner’s wiki contributions as there were a few students editing the page at once.  It was frustrating that many students could not work on the wiki at the same time, and because of this, I think I prefer GoogleDocs.  As well as being able to edit the document simultaneously, GoogleDocs’ formatting options are also more user-friendly and advanced (document, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and drawing functions available).

Anyway, back to wikis ... I hope that all these problems I had with this wiki are teething problems that I will come to understand (and overcome) better with time and experience.  Technical issues aside, I did enjoy the collaborative approach of the wiki.  It was insightful to read fellow student’s thoughts and opinions on the topic, many of which I had not thought of.  In this case, a collaborative approach to the problem definitely gave a richer response.  In the past, collaborative activities like these that I have participated in were conducted via email.  Email collaboration is messy.  If everyone responds to the same email thread, you can have a comprehensive collection of thoughts in one document, however, many times, there are many documents being circulated at once.  This can be due to some emails being replied just to the sender (and not reply all) so the rest of the group misses out on that contribution.  The other problem can be that participants do not read their most recent emails first, so respond to earlier email threads, resulting in a double up of email threads circulating.  The use of a wiki is much tidier.  One document (saved in one location, but because it is online, it is not dependent on everyone having access to the file in a common drive), many contributors ... it makes sense. I wish I had discovered the world of wikis before now (again, assuming the technical issues are just part of my learner status with using wikis).  One of the drawbacks of a wiki was that reading earlier posts from fellow learners may have influenced my thoughts on the topic.  Rather than seeing the question and writing a response for each of the thinking hats, I read the earlier comments from fellow learners and then devised my response.  While I think it made me consider the issue more broadly (flagging issues / thoughts that I had not considered earlier), I am conscious it may have subconsciously affected my final post.  It would be interesting to see how different the wiki responses would look if everyone just had to submit their own responses directly the teacher who then collated them …. Would the 'blind' approach make a difference?

I think as a teacher, the use of wikis could definitely be useful.  They seem like a tool that could be appropriate to use in most subjects under the TPACK Framework.  Of course, the teacher would have to make an assessment as to whether he/she felt that the use of wikis would enhance the content and pedagogical knowledge (PCK) of the subject.  In a school learning context, I think wikis would be useful for students to collaborate on a group assignment, or practice questions for an upcoming exam.  And if the students create the wiki themselves, learn from each other, analyse and make judgements about the value of the ideas presented, and have meaningful discussions about their rationale/decisions made, they are demonstrating high order thinking skills as per Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.  

I could not find one, but if there is a wiki app, this would make the use of wikis even more accessible and accepted by students.  They can contribute to their school/lesson wiki on their iPad or smart phone wherever they are.  The use of wikis in schools does not necessarily need to be for a complex curriculum based problem. I think that they could also be useful for group tasks such as organising a cultural day or science excursion where students need to (as a group) decide on and organise resources, pre-tasks, tasks on the day/event etc.  The use of wikis in this situation takes the teacher out of the organising role, and allows students to make decisions on their own as a group – to take ownership for the event. 

Because wikis are online, students need to understand and comply with guidelines regarding the safe, ethical and legal use of working online.  For a wiki, students need to keep their username and password safe so that no other student (or other person) logs on and puts comments posing as them, they need to ensure everything they post in the wiki does not have defamatory or abusive language or concepts, that they do not erase on purpose other students contributions, and that they adequately reference anyone else's work or images etc that they use.  Students should be encouraged to set up a list of wiki rules for the class before they participate in the wiki - by them deciding on the rules (and consequences of unethical behaviour), they will hopefully take the rules more seriously, and take ownership over the safe and ethical use when they are working in the wiki.

 How did the scaffold support the collection of a range of perspectives?

The use of Debono’s Thinking Hats as a scaffold for the mobile phones activity was extremely useful to build new knowledge and collect the wide range of perspectives.  I cannot speak for everyone, however, I found that because of the scaffolding, I was able to broaden my thinking of this topic, rather than just focusing on my initial reactions and the style of thinking I prefer.  I am not a creative person, so would not have normally thought of creative solutions and possibilities, however, I (surprisingly) found the Green Hat to be quite fun.    I imagine that without the scaffolding, most people would have simply answered based on the style of thinking they prefer/do best.  The other benefit of the scaffolding was that the responses collected were categorised into the different modes.  This would make the final discussion, theme identification and decision making process much simpler as the information presented was in logical 'chunks' (even though the individual ‘chunks’ were messy with lots of information in no logical order other than by upload time).   In this activity, scaffolding definitely did enhance the learning experience.  For my teaching, I must ensure I adequately scaffold activities such as wikis and blogs so that the expected learning outcomes can be delivered.  While it is important for students to find their own learning journey, scaffolding can ensure students consider all perspectives (even if it is just a PMI or SWOT analysis and not a full de Bonos Thinking Hat scaffold), and use these perspectives to analyse the topic (rather than basing their decision, ideas and learning just on their initial thoughts). 

 

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2009). Internet Use and Mobile Phones. 4901.0 - Children's Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities, Australia, Apr 2009 Retrieved 7 March 2013, from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/4901.0~Apr+2009~Main+Features~Internet+use+and+mobile+phones?OpenDocument

Fasso, Wendy. (2013). A Brief Overview of Learning Theory.   Retrieved 3 March 2013, from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491: ICTs for Learning Design, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=115326

Mergel, Brenda. (1998, 5 Feb 2001). Instructional Design & Learning Theory.   Retrieved 3 March 2013, from http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm#Behaviorism

Moursund, David. (2005). Introduction to Information and Communication Technology in Education (pp. 121).  Retrieved from http://pages.uoregon.edu/moursund/Books/ICT/ICTBook.pdf