Blog reflection on wiki activity

This reflection is about the learning that was facilitated in the Mobile Phones wiki. The processes and practices involved with this task demonstrates the learning theories constructivism, behaviourism, cognitivism, and connectivism.

Constructivism involves the social aspects of learning. With the interactions available throughout constructing and manipulating posts on the wiki, students are able to learn while interacting and engaging with other students. Within the wiki, social and technological etiquette is a helpful prior knowledge. This demonstrates the importance of scaffolding to enable students the full understanding of respect and ownership of data and ideas submitted to the wiki. These environments allow an individual's skills, knowledge and understanding to be elaborated and extended.

Behavioursim can be linked to a wiki, through the allowance of usage being promoted as a reward for appropriateness within an educational environment, or as a tool to encourage appropriate behaviours within an online environment.

Cognitivism associated with wikis allows learners to experience information through sight and sound via text, video, audio, and pictures. This also leads to the sense of emotional feeling. These aspects of learning extend a students understanding of concepts within the wiki.

Connectivism is identified with the learners having a sense of connection to the contents, the other members, the conversations, the developments, and the wiki in general. This aspect allows the leaner to identify, what has been learnt, plus the where and how to gather more information to be learnt.

All these theories are different, but all connect with online learning in their own way. The use of an online learning area, can benefit multiple individuals, in multiple ways. The benefits or issues of using wikis as a learning place is the necessary scaffolding and precautions needed in advance, to ensure students understand the legal, ethical, and safe practices invovled with this environment. For my, wikis are an ideal support tool for any key learning area. I am currently using one for a music unit, and have previously used some for mathematics and SOSE. I feel these can be used any time, for any learning, providing the students have been thoroughly scaffolded and ready for this responsibility.

I have previously explored these learning theories, and the use of wikis, in another blog posting: Week 1 and 2 activities