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To my surprise, I’m still recommending PBWorks to teachers as a good way to get started using a wiki. That’s because the Moodle wiki is still not a very effective tool, and PBWorks is easy-to-use and provides some good features for developing and formatting content. It’s proprietary, of course, so it has to be used with caution, but it’s a good way to get started.

When I’m introducing teachers to the potential of wikis and other web tools, I naturally start by getting them to set up and work with wikis themselves. It seems to me like a set of core skills – how to plan and put together a collection of linked pages. This can be applied in reflective individual writing or as a collaborative exercise.

Here’s a 3-page PDF document on how to get started with PBWorks. It’s covered by the by-nc-sa licence so you are welcome to download and use it as you see fit provided it’s not used commercially and my authorship is attributed.

If you modify or adapt it, please add a comment to this post with a link to the new version.

Mary Bennet at eScholars says:

Wikis are excellent tools for collaboration. When wikis are used students learn to collect and share information as well as publish and negotiate.

I agree with the first statement, but the second appears to confuse the tool with how it is used. It seems to suggest that the learning identified will happen because a wiki is used. That’s not the case – it’s the collaborative activities the teacher sets up based around a wiki that will (if successful) enable students to learn to ‘collect and share information as well as publish and negotiate’.

Use of a wiki does not automatically lead to learning to collaborate. Likewise, not using a wiki does not prevent such learning from occurring: other tools such as Google Docs can be used in learning to collaborate. So it’s how the tool is used that leads to the desired learning.

As I’ve described elsewhere, wikis are useful for more than just collaboration: they are also a very useful tool for non-collaborative learning such as personal reflection. So the thoughtful application of the tool is crucial to achieving success. Those of us working in professional development in education have seen poorly-planned incorporation of wikis and other technology tools lead to disappointment and disillusionment.

The use of a wiki as a learning tool within a course is more complex than a straightforward collaboration between a small group of co-workers working on a shared project. So how the wiki is applied in the learning context requires more careful planning. If this were not so, learning design would cease to be a productive activity, and solving the technical issues of incorporating a wiki and training teachers and students in its use would be all that’s required. The limited uptake of tools such as wikis in education suggests this is not the case.

There’s an interesting discussion going on at the moment over at Stephen’s Web about Second Life. It centres around the observation that delivering a lecture in SL is still just a lecture – ‘We know how to bore you in a classroom, and now we know how to bore you online’. A key point for me is that it’s not enough to rely on novelty of delivery to get learners interested and engaged, the process and the learning itself needs to be engaging.

It’s also interesting to compare assumptions about how SL would be used in education – some see it as a simulation, others as a tool for constructing a highly specific virtual environment, others as a replacement for a learning management system. My take is that it will do some of these rather well, others quite poorly!

As a Mac user, I’d never had much fun with SL, but when I saw that Small Worlds was now public, I was keen to try it out. Part of my interest was that it’s based here in New Zealand, but also I hoped it might provide a lower threshold environment I could incorporate into my professional development activities. The picture here of my avatar is as far as I got – Small World’s suggestion that before I did anything I should ‘go shopping’ was like a bucket of cold water to my motivation! I already spend enough time shopping in the real world without having to do it in the virtual one as well. And I think I know enough about my learners, their technical skills and access to technology to know it would never work.

In his article A New Virtual World Winter?, Bruce Damer says:

Is interaction in a VW that much more enriching and valuable than the simpler modalities available in other platforms? Will VWs ever really go mainstream? I continuously hear complaints about VWs not being worth the trouble, especially from people much younger and hipper than me (I am 46) who prefer much lighter weight forms of interaction.

While I don’t think we should necessarily see youth and hipness as the sole qualification to speak on learning, I think this quote holds a lot of truth. We already expect learners to jump over lots of hurdles – eg learning to use a new LMS and other IT systems – without making them clear the greater barriers in using virtual worlds. Some already have the skills and the online presence, but a great many more don’t.

In general, I can see specific applications of virtual worlds such as Dante’s Inferno as having huge potential, but the generic application as some kind of ‘pimped-up’ learning management system doesn’t seem realistic at this point in time. I prefer software tools which liberate me from the constraints and humdrum details of everyday life rather than replicate them, which remove barriers for my learners rather than impose new ones. If I want to share ideas, I use low-threshold tools (such as WordPress) which allow me to focus on the ideas rather than the interface. Virtual worlds such as Second Life or Croquet pose too high a threshold to be used in my professional development activities in the immediate future.

An interview with Hannah Pia Baral about her experience with Appreciative Inquiry as a professional development approach to developing leadership:

Hannah, how have you used Appreciative Inquiry?

I did a masters paper at AUT that used Appreciative Inquiry as an approach to examine our professional practice. At that time I was working as a manager for a private training provider. It took a while to convince me that this is a valid method as I was used to a problem-solving approach to identifying gaps and fixing problems. In the end, I realised that this was an effective approach to evaluate one’s own practice from a positive angle by starting off with asking questions based on my own strengths, successes, values, hopes and dreams. Appreciative Inquiry is typically presented as a cycle of four phases known as a 4-D Cycle:

• Phase 1: Discovery of people’s experiences of their group, organization, or community at its most vital and alive and what made those experiences possible
• Phase 2: Dreaming together to envision a future in which those exceptional experiences form the bases for organizing
• Phase 3: Designing appreciative systems and structures to support the manifestation of the co-created dreams
• Phase 4: Destiny or delivery, which involves in implementation of those systems and structures in an ever-expanding positive-feedback loop of appreciative learning

But why did you choose Appreciative Inquiry for this process?

Although I did not personally choose AI as an approach, I was pleased that I had the opportunity to discover it through my postgraduate studies. Initially it felt like a ‘wishy-washy, feel-good’ exercise but I soon discovered that this approach has a lot of grunt and depth. I have since seen Appreciative Inquiry used by political and educational organisations to evaluate projects and activities. I think people who are new to AI should give it a chance before making judgement on it.

How did you go about it?

As part of my assignment I interviewed colleagues I worked closely with. I asked them specific questions like: When am I at my best? My most valued qualities? And on a perfect day, what would my professional practice be like? I also kept a reflective journal for the duration of the academic semester.

What did you find out using the AI approach?

I realised that my professional life is an extension of who I am as person. My professional life does not define my identity and it should not dictate my life. I was able to explore some of my strengths as a leader and what I was good at. This allowed me to more closely focus on the areas I should further develop in my professional practice. Interestingly, the feedback from my colleagues matched the areas that I thoroughly enjoyed in my job. I also found myself asking big questions like ‘what is my life purpose?’, ‘does my professional life define my identity?’, ‘why am I struggling with work/life balance?’, ‘am I still aligned with the organizational values?’, ‘what type of work environment am I best suited to?’. The process became a personal journey of discovery and reflection not confined to my professional practice.

How would you describe the benefits of AI for you?

Human beings generally draw their strength from affirmations, positive feedback and knowing their purpose in life. For me, I found the process really valuable in exploring my own personal and professional identity, and in developing a longer-term view of my own professional and leadership development. The outcome is a major paradigm shift in my own thinking which has had a significant impact on others around me and on my own professional practice.

As a professional developer, I make extensive use of collaborative groups to generate and share knowledge. Stephen Downes says some pejorative things about groups, but I’ve recently seen some positive spin-offs from collaboration involving groups of educators from different institutions.

As part of the DFE project, I’ve seen how a small group of educators from a cluster of institutions can share and compare good practice from within their respective institutions and work together on a synthesis. For example, drawing together systems and tools for managing flexible learning development – individually these have some big gaps, but they can be synthesised to create something much more comprehensive and useful.

Rather than groups being a force which automatically homogenises everything into a bland conformity (Stephen’s ‘metal ingot’), they can build on the diversity of members and their shared goals to produce work of value which respects diversity. The results can be far more effective than the individuals could develop on their own.

I suspect one key factor is the effectiveness with which the group self-manages the tension between the diversity of its members and the shared goals to which they are working. In other words, the institutional capability is partly reliant on the personal capabilities of the individuals within the collaborative group. This illustrates an issue I raised in an earlier post: what is the relationship between individual and institutional capability? Systems and resources alone are not enough, and developing institutional capability must incorporate professional development which helps develop individuals’ capability as well as their skills and knowledge.