I'm hoping to write my dissertation on wikis.

Topic: Analysis of the use of wikis as a preparation for an oral debate on German history (East vs West during 1961-89)

 Setting: Face-to-face language teaching, students prepare for and present debate in groups

My motivation (purpose): Last semester one of the assessments was to present a debate in groups. While the students did quite well in the debates, I felt they would have benefited from a more intense preparation, reading more texts, finding more arguments for their views and generally preparing more long-term. I also felt they could have collaborated more effectively. I would like to see whether a wiki would help them achieve these aims.

Research questions:

 1. To find out whether students find wikis useful to prepare them for an oral debate (Method: questionnaire)

2. To find out whether the use of wikis encourages students to engage deeply with the topic (Method: observation )

3. To find out whether the students collaborate effectively while using the wiki (Methods: observation and questionnaires)

4.To find out whether the preparation with the help of wikis actually improves the oral performance (Method: observation)

Methodology: Grounded Theory using a qualitative approach, though I may include some quantitative analysis of the data from the questionnaires.

My thoughts on these research questions:

Research question 1: This is a very subjective question, and students won't be able to compare their experiences to a similar situation without the use of wikis. I would maybe need to find criteria for "usefulness", i.e. how enjoyable was the experience, how much do you think you learnt...

Research question 2: I would need to find some criteria to measure how deeply students engage with the topic, for instance number of entries, how many books were read, how much did they reflect, argue, comment etc

Research question 3: Again I would need to find criteria for measuring this, for instance equality of participation, number of comments, etc

Research question 4: This would be very tricky to analyse without comparison to a different group. I could use my experience as a language teacher to assess whether the students are doing particularly well. However, every group of students is different. Criteria I could maybe use would be: How well prepared are they , how fluently are the students speaking, how broad is their vocabulary, how knowledgeable are they, how well do they interact in speech.

A different problem: Using a written plattform to prepare for an oral debate
Using wikis to prepare for an oral debate will mean that students will also need to concentrate on their written skills, and this could lead to an additional research question:

5. To find out whether wikis can support learning to write in a foreign language (Methods: observation, interview with student tutor)

My thoughts on
Research question 5: Criteria for this might be number of corrections, quality of language. The students would be interacting with a student tutor to help them with the language in their wikis, and an interview with the student tutor would give additional information on how effective wikis are to improve written skills.

Marking the wikis

In order to motivate students to use the wikis I would give them a goup mark for the wiki. This needs to be thought through. It could be a mark for the end product or several marks at intervals (though this would cause a heavy work load). Criteria might be number of contributions, comments, corrections, richness of content, correctness (of end product).

Important: I need to remember though that the written wiki and the oral debate are two different tasks and require different skills. So research questions 1-4 just refer to preparation of the oral debate, whereas research question 5 leads to a different area.

Would it be better to just concentrate on questions 1-4?

I do think question 5 is quite interesting as well.

All comments are very welcome!

Firstly you'll need to try and get back into FlashMx after a few weeks of not using it.. the shear amount of stuff you've forgotten is needed as a catalyst for distraction.

Secondly you'll need access to the internet,

Third, have something in the back of you mind that needs sorting out, in the following case it's CAD software for the Mac, at the moment is seems non exsistant.

and lastly have something really cool to do instead.

OK. the method..

Get into Flash with the following photos.

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These are two photos of a milling machine as found in a general DT workshop.

the difference between the two photos is that one has the guard down the other up.

Fairly simple and you can see where i'm going with them.. the'll go into flash as another quick fire challeng, "whats wrong" "click it" "next level" type thing

Before they can go into flash, we need to get rid of the crap in the background and replace any white space with a transparent background, called the alpha channel... i think.

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This take about an hour to do the two photo.. quicker if you're organised, infinately long if you're not.

With these two images, open flash and get really confused... realise that you've never done this type of action before and start looking on the net for a solution, find a CAD program that is used for MAC, download it and get a pleasant surprise when you see its a Virtual Lego builder

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spend a few hours building stuff and wonder if there is anyway to up the image quality with lighting dynamics.

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Find that the program you need requires two other programs and a separate utility to expand them both.

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 Get back to Flash when you realise that you're not achieving anything... although now you're thinking of different applications for the newly found software and you want to incorporate it, or at least make a Lego movie

ok so the mill..

eventually found out how to do the action by looking back at my blog and comparing notes to the past scenes I had done.

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Now I'm getting distracted by this blog....

off to play cooking mama

Feenberg writes 'speeding up and improving asynchronous exchanges causes unexpected distress.'

Yea? Feenberg should try Video conference through a 56k modem, see how unexpectedly distressed he becomes then!!!

it's 7.30 on a Friday morning, at work just seeing how this works and what it's going to look like. 

I liked this paper's no-nonsense approach (and it was written in a style I could access easily). Several good bits of content:-

From the paper:-

 The essence of the challenge for all educators in the 21st century is to get the learners to:-

• read more widely
• see more clearly
• think more clearly
• (why am I thinking of the song "Day By Day"?)
• challenge authority on every occasion
• more importantly get learners to challenge themselves

 The aim is to promote the free-flow of information and ideas in the interest of all and to promote a thriving culture, economy and democracy.

 Information Literacy is the ability to deal with complexities of the current information environment - it must

• subsume all the skill-based literacies but not be restricted by them
• not be restricted to any one technology / technology group
• centre around understanding, meaning and context

 So much e-learning remains as e-teaching (the provision of lecture material online) - is this due to poor information literacies amonst the tutors?

 The "information literate" are those who know when they need information and are able to identify, locate, evaluate, organise and effectively use the information to address and resolve problems

 The Australian Information Literacy Standards

An information literate individual has learned how to learn and is able to:-

1. recognise a need for information
2. determine the extent of the information needed
3. access the needed information efficiently
4. evaluate the information and its sources
5. incorporate selected information into their knowledge base
6. use information effectively to accomplish a purpose
7. understand the economic, legal, social and cultural issues around the use of information
8. access and use information ethically and legally
9. classify / store / maipulate the information generated
10. recognise information literacy as a pre-requisite for lifelong learning

I sorry but I found this paper rather dull although it did contain some little gems of information I could use.

Firstly, Barrett attests that most graduates did not have a clear sense of their research aims at the start of the process - they fumbled about and were guided by colleagues, tutors and supervisors. This is so good to hear as I am usually in the same boat. The important thing here is that this is probably when most of the searching of libraries and whatnot occurs - so that searching can at bet be unfocussed and at worst be blind fishing. Without good IL skills the period of fuzziness is probably an awful lot longer than it needs to be.

The second little gem was that most students lack personal collections and substantial subject expertise. Again, I thought I was alone but so many people I have spoken to lack a personal collection or just have haphazard piles of documents in cupboards or piled on desks. From this knowledge I feel I can make best use of the web-based personal catalogues offered by del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl It, Zimbio and the like. All the tools are there - we just don't use them. I shall catalogue all my piles of paper.

Hellfire!

What a paper to start us off on! It was like pulling teeth but I got there in the end I think. A good (content) opener for the course as it provided so much food for thought.

Intertextuality has to exist otherwise we would have to write everything de novo each time - scientific advances would be limited to the lifespan of any one scientist.

Newspapers of ten translate the "official" laguage of politicians and the like into the vocabulary of the the day-to-day spoken word (or rather the newspaper's interpretation of the spoken word). Why do they have to do this? Is it that "official" language is not digestable by the masses or are we losing the ability to understand "proper" vocabulary? I fear I do not know the answer to this!

From the paper:-

 Many non-commodity institutions are being drawn more and more into the commodity model and the matrix of consumerism - they are under pressure to "package" their "commodities" and "sell" them to "consumers".

 Presuppositions (based on prior texts of the text-producers or by other texts) can be manipulative as well as sincere - they are a good way of manipulating people as they are very difficult to challenge.

 A genre is not only a particular text type but a particular process of producing, distributing and consuming that text

 A discourse is a particular way of constructing a subject matter. E.g. Medicine is an area of knowledge constructed from a technological and scientific perspective unlike that of "alternative medicine"

Although this paper was a good read I do feel that it took an awfully long time to say not a lot.

Reading the paper did improve my understanding of sequential and cultural contexts in speech utterances and the importance of considering these when analysing dialogues.

Understanding the relationships between conversation participants helps understand the conversation through analysing the dialogue - are the participants on an equal footing or does one have some sort of superiority over another? This would change the giving and receiving of an utterance.

From the paper:-

 There is no point looking at a single utterance without considering their place in the local sequence of utterances and there is no point just looking at their sequential place if the contextual details are available. Contextual knowledge is a luxury though

 The analyst must know the cultural as well as the sequential rules for the use of certain utterances to correctly analyse the dialogue