Group 5 - Facilitation-Motivation

Group 5 - Facilitation

This Groups topic is Collaborative Learning Wikis

Three questions were posed for discussion:

1. What software is your school district using to help students with academic difficulties?
2. Has collaborative software increased performance ability in your students?
3. Have you been presented with data that supports the use of collaborative learning?

Though three questions on the topic of Collaborative Learning Wikis were posed, the discussion remained centered on the software that a particular district was using. To aid the group in beginning a new discussion thread pertaining to one of the other proposed topics, the response was not great. It seemed that the majority of the participants were unwilling to relinquish the original topic, though clearly evidenced that the thread of discussion had been exhausted and no new or valuable information was being exchanged.

This group could have used more scaffolding and directing by the course instructor to redirect and facilitate a couple of discussion thread that would have enticed the participants to explore their assigned topic in more depth for understanding and application.

Some activities that would have aided the learning experience:

• A demonstration of how a collaborative wiki works for communication.
• A listing and description of various wiki products and/or applications.
• A case study on the use of collaborative wikis in the K12 public school educational settings.

The participants of this group were lacking direction and a reason that would have made the information valuable to them.
The member of this group were lacking sufficient base knowledge that would have provide a connection of usefulness to the acquisition of the new knowledge.

In John Keller's ARCS model the R is representative of " Relevance". Relevance, based on review of the discussion thread is an issue for this group. It seems that many are not yet in a school system working as an educator. Possibly the members are not very interested in the application of technology. Those that are in the class room do not and/or have not actively employed technology as a learning tool in their class room.