Christopher D Sessums suggests on his Knowing me Knowing you: post that "Social software has two key attributes that could be considered meaningful to educators:
- Permits communication between groups and individuals – In this sense, social software serves as a medium or channel that supports an exchange, or an ecology where people, practices, and values connect, interact, and evolve (Suter et al., 2005).
- Enables the aggregation and sharing of resources -- Social software not only allows people to collect, communicate, and collaborate online, it allows data, information, and objects to be combined and consolidated, serving as a place where both ideas and people can converge."
I played with a seedwiki wiki last year with a group of students and their teachers from our iPAinT ict_pd cluster during a two day game making workshop. We collected lots of student thinking about the process of making games in FlashMX - it was a controlled experience. Using the wiki to enable the aggregation and sharing of student reflections.
I am playing again, this time with a wikispaces wiki about “knowledge building” for educators attending ULearn06. And this time I have designed the wiki for communication, collaboration and the aggregation and sharing of resources. Dunno why but I especially like the thought of using a knowledge building process and technology to build knowledge about knowledge building.
The whole experience is kind of weird – not at all like the certainty of blogging – using a wiki to allow multiple conversations is a little like watching an unmoderated mousetrap and ping pong ball chain reaction - taken into a gymnasium - “a gymnasium full of mousetraps. On each mousetrap is a ping pong ball. Now throw a single ping pong ball into the middle of the room. The ball lands on a trap, the trap triggers, and a second ball flies into the air. The first ball also bounces into the air again, so now there are two balls in the air. Each of those two balls triggers another trap, so there's four balls in the air. And so on...”
Every time I open the door of the gymnasium I discover new thoughts pingponging across the surface of the wiki.
The experience has a rawness and a freedom that I quite like – the ULearn06 educators and others prepared to take intellectual risks are “knowledge building” about “knowledge building”.
Seemed that no one much wants to use the threaded discussion so I have set up a “Janet and John” page at the front where we can capture generalizations and consensus arising from the wiki conversations shared and interrupted.
The whole process made me interested in a comment by Denham on George Siemens Knowing Knowledge Blog Post What is an author’s duty?
What is an authors duty?
Is an author's main duty to make sense for readers? Is it to open doors? Is it to present a preformed world view? Is it to invite the reader to dialogue…to think…to reflect?
Sense-making is undoubtedly a key activity in our world today (much of confusion and insane amounts of information). The real question - and I still encounter this in my classrooms - is who is the sense maker: the author or the reader?
The key to knowledge that is social, emergent, networked and resides within an ecology is to ask hard questions, engage the reader, allow annotations and to provide affordances for forming connections.
It is not the author's role to perorate nor duty to enlighten - that must come from within, by making new connections, finding deeper understanding and sharing meaning.
Sense-making happens in dialog within a community of users.
Guess the Janet and John page will be the public face of any sense making that comes out of this ULearn06 wiki based dialogue
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