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Week 2 Reflections

The Hat Trick

During the course of this weeks engagement activities I found myself participating in an online discussion about the use of mobile phones in the classroom on a Wiki, scaffolded with the use of De Bono's six hats. Whoa now, who needs six hats for his wikity what?  Ok so lets break this down real quick now. 1. What is a wiki (and why should anyone care)? and 2. Whats the deal with De Bono and his hat fetish?

1. Wikis are free to set up websites that facilitate the contribution of all users and allow posts to be edited by anyone with access to the site as well as being able to upload pictures and other files.  Why is this good? They are delightfully easy to set up, simple to use and all data is saved in the history so if someone deletes all your hard work and replaces it with a picture of a lolcat you can always get back what they destroyed. They aren't perfect by any stretch but we'll talk about that in a minute. 

2. De Bono's hats is a thinking tool that provides a framework to aid people in thinking clearly by directing them in one direction at a time (The Opportunity Thinker, 2012).  Check out the snazzy hats below to get a handle on what's what and we'll then we'll talk about how this framework worked for the mobile phone discussion.

(Sourced from http://www.olivewriting.com/six-thinking-hats/)

Wiki/Six Hat Engagement Activity

Firstly, for anyone interested in the debate about the use of mobile phones in the classroom I would highly recommend checking out the Mobile Phones Wiki because there are some great ideas on the subject there.  The general consensus seemed to be that there were a lot of dangers but a world of possibilities and it seems like it will ultimately depend on the teacher as to how widely, if at all, the technology wil be employed in the classroom.  The outcome of the debate is not my main concern so much as how well did the venue, i.e. a Wiki and the scaffolding of the discussion through the use of De Bonos six hats, work?  Lets look firstly at the tech side of things and consider the Wiki.

I thought the Wiki was very well suited to this task being simple to use and easy to follow.  I was able to view other peoples' opinions and then add mine in to the conversation with ease.  The problem that can be faced with Wikis though and I believe could have annoyed the early birds a bit is that only one person can edit a post at a time. This problem was compounded by the fact that the whole discussion, despite being divided into six areas was all one post meaning out of all that talking only one person could add their opinion at a time.  In this regard a site allowing real time contribution by multiple users would be much more prefferable. Considering this from a social constructivist view point the use of a Wiki can promote excellent learning by allowing students to pool ideas to collaborate knowledge and also to see others view points and opinions and thus form more well rounded opinions of their own. By and large though I believe the Wiki got the job done because sometimes the simplest solution can be the best.

As for the musical hats game - I was pleasantly surprised.  I was already familar with the strategy but this was my first time actually using it.  In a discussion like this one where everyone had so many ideas, having the thinking hats strategy in place meant that people were able to focus their thoughts and also split up the conversation to make it easy to follow.  I found personally that I was able to follow what was going on more easily than had it just been a conglomerate of random comments on mobile phones.  Each hat worked as a set of focus questions for me and by having other peoples answers divided into sections I found it east to make informed decisions and contribute meaningfully to the conversation despite coming into it so late.  I can definitely see the benefit of this thinking tool in the classroom for focussing kids ideas and also breaking down a big task into more managable chunks.  It has also been noted that the provision of such rich conversation in a clear and observable fashion provides a perfect stage for the high level synthesising at the top of Blooms Taxonomy (CQU, 2012), further validating the use of this thinking strategy in the classroom.

Overall I felt that the combination of the Wiki and the six thinking hats scaffolding was a very effective means for holding the mobile phone discussion.   The quality of discourse in the Wiki is testament to its success.

References

Fasso (2012) FAHE1101: managing e-learning. Retrieved, 16/08/12, from http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=12580  

The Opportunity Thinker (2012). Six thinking hats: de bone for schools. Retrieved, 16/08/12,   from debonoforschools.com/asp/six_hats.asp