What A Load Of Wiki!

Wikis are an effective tool to enable collaborative work within the school setting or with others around the world and allow children to share their work outside the four classroom walls.

Wikis can be used in two ways - show and display or collaboration. Show and display is the most common method as it allows children to display their work on the Internet so their friends and family can view or to share with their partner schools around the world.

An example of a school using wikispaces as 'show and display' can be seen at The High School of Dundee's Junior School wikispace. Here you will see how each year group has their own area to display their ICT work.

An example of a school using wikispaces as a collaborative tool, within the school setting, can be seen at The High School of Dundee's Junior School RadioHigh. The children use this wikispace to create collaborative radio shows.

Finally, an example of using wikispaces to collaborate and 'show and display' can be seen at Voices Of The World where schools around the world work together to connect our children.

Let's Get Talking

The use of the voice as a means of presentation online by children is possible in this world where the written and typed word are the main means of communication. One way this is possible is through the online tool voki where children, and adults, can create an animated character that talks.

Here are some examples of vokis being used in education:

1. Teacher's using the tool for personal use - see my voki to top right of this blog;

2. Children using voki to introduce each other by telling 8 random facts about themselves at the High School of Dundee;

3. Children using voki to connect with others around the world at Voices Of The World;

4. Using voki as a school mascot to develop listening skills and engage children in the learning process.;

5. Modern Languages - learn words, listen in French and translate into English etc'

6. To introduce what the children are going to learn today as below (WALT & WILF):



Get a Voki now!

Legitimate Peripheral Participation - Situated Learning

This grand title, Legitimate Peripheral Participation, sounds better placed in a law book than in education, however, the addition of, Situated Learning, to the title gives the game away. This book reflects the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in the late 80's early 90's. Reading a book published in 1991 is a contrast from my normal repertoire where I am normally looking forward and finding what will be happening next in Education. However, to look forward, a backward step is always required to understand what came before and how to build on it.

Lave and Wenger theory of learning, back in the early 90's was that a move from viewing learning as acquisition of certain forms of knowledge to seeing it as a social relationship where situations and participation and the keys to learning through Communities Of Practice. Lave and Wenger believed that the best way to learn is through working with others where learning is distributed amongst peers rather than individualised and stored in the heads of individuals. Learning is not seen as a discrete body of abstract knowledge but about engaging in the learning process with others. This has similarities to Vygotsky's sociocultural approach that incorporates Marxist theories where culture provides the children with the means to, what to think and how to think. According to Vygotsky, children learn through shared problem solving with others, parent, teacher, sibling or peers where the child is guided initially with knowledgeable parent etc until some responsibility can be taken by the child.

Learning in this way is referred to, by Vygotsky, as working in the Zone of Proximal Development where cognitive development occurs through interaction with others. Lave and Wenger's Legitimate Peripheral Participation mirrors Vygotsky's theory in that through working with others in actional contexts, children can construct knowledge.

Etienne Wenger explains the three dimensions to a Community Of Practice:

What is it about? - joint participation

How it functions? - mutual engagement

What capability it has produced? - shared repertoire of resources, routines, vocab etc.

Reflecting on these three dimensions and my own collaborative projects, there are many similarities to the Voices Of The World (VOTW) project where:

What is it about? - children around the world participating together each month in a global project to unite our children using their voices rather than text.

How it functions? - through agreement by teachers a monthly task is undertaken using the same skills and rules as all involved.

What capability it has produced? - through sharing the same resource, wikispace, routine and media.

Using the term 'collaborative' for the above project could be said to focus more on technical knowledge, skills and creating a product to share with others in a show and display area where children can learn from one another. Communities of Practice, however, are more than skills and knowledge, they are also:

- relationships

- identity

- commitments

- memories

Building communities with technology, for our children to learn and for like minded educators to learn from one another, enable learning to expand the term situated from the immediate community to the global one.

A Task For My Viking Educators!

Below is the instructions for my viking educators to create their own vokis. Have fun.

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The New Technologies Guidelines

The new Technologies Guidelines issued by Learning Teaching Scotland are a breath of fresh air to the out-dated 5-14 Guidelines. The 5-14 Guidelines were a good source of knowing what skills children were to develop when they were first published in 2000. Due to the advancements in technology, the skills the chidlren have all ready acquired through using technology outwith school and the drive of the Curriculum For Excellence where creativity and active learning should now be at at the heart of teaching and learning, the new guidelines provide a framework for implementing a more creative approach with Technology.

The slideshow below provides and overview of the new guidelines with a closer look at the Early Years level which is applicable to Nursery and Primary 1 in Scottish schools.

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Progressive Inquiry In Computer Supporte Collaborative Learning (CSILE)

Facilitation of progressive inquiry at school appears to require changing in the traditional division of cognitive labor between the teacher and the students and encouraging students themselves take on responsibility for cognitive (e.g., questioning, explaining) and metacognitive (e.g., goalsetting, monitoring, and evaluating) aspects of inquiry (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987). Teachers should not, however, rely too much on students’ unguided creativity, but should intervene by providing pedagogical guidance and an expert-model if students are not able to make progress themselves. Therefore, in order to productively participate in CSCL, in each pedagogical situation balance should be found between teacher-controlled and student-controlled aspects of inquiry (Hakkarainen, Lipponen, & Järvelä, in press).

In traditional classroom learning situations the goals of the learning are clear, concrete and mainly set up by the teacher. In a progressive-inquiry classroom, students have to self-generate their learning agenda and are also responsible for setting up goals.

This may look like giving children too much freedom to learn what they think they need to learn. Delve a little deeper and it is clear that this is not the case. Rather than teach children in the traditional way and churn through page after page of a course book because it fits the exam, why not find out what the children know and need to learn. It may be that the children are ready to take the exam tomorrow.

Giving children the opportunity to reflect on what they know and plan what they need to find out is actually harder work than picking up the textbook and teaching from that. The teacher needs to still have broad aims and objectives working within a framework which is then developed with the needs of the children.

Reflection of how we learn and how we teach is not a bad thing. I know that my reflections are highlighting that the web 2.0 is being used too much as a show and retrieve model rather than true collaboration between others. Rather than communicating and producing individual products it is now time for mass collaboration to create one end product!

Collaborative Technology For Facilitating Progressive Inquiry

'A fundamental aspect of the design of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments is to provide users tools for posting knowledge productions into a shared working space and providing tools for progressive discourse interaction between the users.' (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1993)

Today's free Web 2.0 tools enable 'computer supported collaborative learning environments' if used in the correct context. Take blogs for example, many are used by educators as an electronic diary to show what what is happening at school. My school blog is exactly this, a place to inform children and parents what is happening at our school. Our school radio blog, RadioHigh, also displays our shows as they are published. In other words, the tools are being used as a means to share with others what we do but with no collaboration.

Not all our blogs are purely show and tell areas but area areas to enable communication with others outwith our school. Our bear blogs allow our children to learn about each other's cultures through bear diaries. Again, they are still a place to publish and show with some aspects of communication through the comment options of each post. In reality, the comments are not really providing the children with 'true' communication due to the inconsistent approach that is implemented by some teachers where the comments are placed randomly with no feedback. More a case of by placing a comment on the blog this is satisfying a tick box. Although the blogging aspect has not produced in depth collaboration, this is not the fault of the children as they are using the tools as they have been taught. The change come in the teacher approach where modelling good practice will sew the seeds of effective collaboration.

The other collaborative tool that I implement at school is wikispaces which provide an excellent tool for collaboration and for show and tell too. True collaboration on the workpieces is taking place through our RadioHigh wikispace where the children work together, outwith school, to create their radio show using the main page as the collaborative script and the discussion area to communicate with one another. I am now currently working on a collaborative activity using wikispace with three countries in Europe that will provide a space to develop their knowledge rather than just share their knowledge mirroring the following approach that emphasis:

'the importance of engaging students in processes of question- and explanation-driven inquiry by imitating practices of scientific research communities. Progressive inquiry entails that new knowledge is not simply assimilated but constructed through solving problems of explanation and understanding (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993).'

Innovative Technologies For Collaboraitve Learning

ITCOLE project focuses on developing innovative pedagogical models, design principles and technology for collaborative knowledge building to be used in European education.

The project has three key scientific and technical objectives:
Develop pedagogical models of collaborative knowledge building for European education.
Develop a modular knowledge-building environment to support collaborative learning.
Evaluate, test and disseminate the environment in European schools in order to build meaningful pedagogical practices and to advance the use of collaborative learning technology.

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is playing an increasing important role in education. The idea that meaningful learning takes place in communities and that knowledge is not static but situated in teams, organisations and social networks is widely acknowledged. Although this is true and many e-learning systems have appeared over the years, many of these environments are designed to manage and share learning materials or work rather than engage in active learning and knowledge building where:

'the users neither merely deliver knowledge nor are they just skimming or 'surfing' through knowledge; they are actively participants in the process of knowledge creation.'

As the use and integration of network technologies increase, society changes and adapts and tunes in to survive. Are we preparing our children for this change where:

'In a knowledge society competence and expertise can no longer be described as the skills of one individual only, but are instead relying on the collaborative expertise of teams and networks, a socially shared cognition and capability.'

As a consequence there needs to be a change in the pedagogical philosophy in education to move more to a more scientific inquiry approach of contributing to collaborative processes of questioning, producing theories and explanations and critically evaluating new understandings. In this approach children are constantly co-constructing knowledge through mutual engagement.

The Progressive Inquiry model acknowledges the socially shared character of enquiry with the following key elements:


Reflecting on this model, does this mirror how I use learning environments and collaboration? I am not entirely sure as I feel many of our school blogs are merely display areas without true collaboration and knowledge building. This is an area I feel I would like to and can develop over the remainder of the school session with the children. Yes it has been good to be publishers to the world but let get down to using the tools to expand our knowledge further.

Finding The Ties That Bind

Harold Edgerton, the inventor of the strobe light, once explained:

'when he wanted to to find something out, first he would ask around to see whether anybody knew the answer, then he would try it out in the lab himself, and only then would he try looking the information up in a book or library.'

There are many similarities to today's networked communities to the networked labs of the past. Today we use our social electronic networks to connect, learn and share with others. Children are using this technology at home to find answers to their homework by first asking someone through MSN. If unsuccessful they 'google' it. Only when these methods fail do they revert to the textbooks. It is not just youngsters who are using the technology to get instant answers but adults too. I can't remember the last time I looked up a book to source the information I am looking for. It is not just the electronic aspect that appeals to me but the now anytime. anywhere aspect the many of our mobile devices are offering. When travelling to work with my colleague, she drives, we have many discussions and many times questions arise that we don't have the answers to, rather than wait until we get to school I 'google' the question with my iPhone. If this does not work, depending on the nature of the question, I email or text someone who I know will respond fairly quickly.

Knowledge building through communities is not a new concept as humans have collaborated over the past centuries to achieve tasks that any one person could not achieve alone. In the world of business and education, in the past, the process of collective action was primarily a 'top down control structure' with management giving orders at the top and the floor workers working! This style was also the 'teaching of the past' style where the teacher is the 'manager' telling the children what they are going to learn with the children being the 'workers' where they produced the completed textbook tasks. This 'top down' approach to teaching is still evident in many schools today as it is secure, gets results and is in a comfort zone. There are also times when this approach is the best suited for the learning environment but is it the best for every lesson? Should children be subjected to didactic teaching the majority of their learning week?

The 'top down' model, in business, moved towards flatter organisational structures developing management information system (MIS) where everyone worked together to collate and store information. Although this system was more favourable than the 'top down' approach the end product was merely a collaborative database system. Nothing really wrong with that, look at wikipedia, the on-line collaborative encyclopedia which has a mass of information due to the collaborative efforts of many across boundaries. Where MIS approaches fall down is where data is churned in by individuals to create a vast database of information without acquiring any knowledge of the subject due to purely inputting information.

There are similarities to this approach in many of the aspects of schooling that children undertake, and I for one am guilty of this approach. Take for example how I used to teach children how to create an interactive map using Google Maps. Thinking I was doing well linking it to a context, the children either created an interactive map of Mark Beaumont's journey around the world or located where all the schools for our global project, Voices Of The World, were from.

On reflection of the MIS model where:

'Until information has been comprehended and interpreted to the point that it can be applied to a situation, it is not knowledge.'

This led me to re-address how I taught interactive maps with more looking at the locations in comparison to where we live and places we know on the map than simply searching information and placing placemarks on the map.

Learning and collaboration are not just about sharing information but about building communities that bind us together. In the project Voices Of The World, there are two sides to the coin: a sub-bread of the MIS system and COP (Community Of Practice) (Lave Wenger. 1991). The Voices Of The World area is the MIS system where schools have worked on a task that will be part of a global outcome in that their children's voices will represent their school and location from the world. This wikispace where the final products are hosted each month could be classes as an Internet page as their is no live collaboration happening on the site; it is just an area to share and display to the naked eye.

For those that manage to get past the 'show and display' aspect of the Voices Of The World wikispace, they will question how these schools manage to unite each month over time and space. This is where the COP comes into being through the teachers' network. Here you will find teachers collaborating, sharing and working together to unite our children together. The community is vibrant where 'learning how to learn is the price of entry into this knowledge-building community' where tools, activities and people constitute the three elements as defined by Activity Theory. These three elements are interdependent where a change to one affects the others, for example, when a new social media tool is introduced each month, participants need to learn and adjust to the new tools as they implement them into their new activity.

Finding the ties that bind is not always that easy. Take for example, a ning network I set up for teachers involved in bear exchanges with my school. This was created to enable the teachers to communicate and collaborate with one another. A place where I could hopefully answer many teachers' questions just once rather than privately in emails. A place to learn from one another and make more connections with other. If you look you will see this did not happen due to no leadership, no desire and no commitment. This community were not ready for this collaborative technology preferring to communicate through the closed walls of their emails as this is the technology that they are accustomed to. Children, on the other hand, have no problems with collaborative technologies and willing embrace it.

Sometimes if you believe something is worth building and the only way to be part is through the community you build the perseverance is all that is needed. The teachers' network for Voices Of The World started with 5 active participants and now has just under 60. Many teachers who joined initially communicated with me through email. However, through using the network to constantly place my communications to the community, the network is a vibrant area for like-minded educationalist to work together.

Let's Count The Voices!

Voices Of The World is still growing with more teachers joining every week. The latest recruit is from Pakistan showing the true communication aspect of the Internet where one person plants a seed that grows and develops through networks. Not only does this seed connect people it also cross-breads within the community to form new species or partnerships.

Creating a community where it is not just publishing and retrieving information is easy and that is what the Voices Of The World wikispace initially looks like: a place to display work from schools around the world. However, if you scratch the surface and manage to get to the actual teachers' network you find a vibrant community of like minded people working together to create a similar end product, conversing with each other to learn from one another's knowledge and expertise, sharing new ideas of practice and forming new partnerships and projects. To me, this is the true community, the hub of activity, the place to meet, learn and share in our flat world.

This global community across the world is being captured in a nutshell by John Johnson from Sandaig Primary with a visual map of where the Voices Of The World Community are from in the form of the Google Map below. Credit goes to John for capturing the people in our community as below:




Although our Voices Of The World community has many branches of activity, the root is connecting our children together using their voices. Last month's task is now on-line where the children were to say the numbers 1 - 10 in their own language accompanied by images. All contributions are now available at the Voices Of The World wikispace and what you will see that although we are effectively all singing from the same hymn book by following the instructions provided, like voices, which sound different, the outcomes look different due to each school's creativity.

One of my favourite contributions for this February's task is from Lebanon due to the numbers not looking like numbers as we know them adding to my learning alongside the children.

Empowerment - eTwinning - Oslo

Each year the Time Magazine selects a 'person of the year' and in 2006 the picture on the front cover was not the same on every publication of this magazine due to a mirror being there. The reasoning behind this was that everyone was important due to the development of Web 2.0 where everyone can be a creator, publisher or critic. This simple idea on the front cover of the above magazine sums up in a nutshell the power of society through today's technology tools.

Back in July 16th 1969 the Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the moon with a computer power of the same capacity of today's modern cars!

Back in 1969 teachers used chalk and talk to teach. Now they have interactive whiteboards that are being used in the same way but with electricity! Many teachers are using ICT to do the same things differently rather than new teaching and learning contexts where there is more: open learning across the world, problem solving, communication, collaboration, student production, authentic learning and whole school engagement.

The above points were highlighted at a recent eTwinning workshop in Oslo, Norway. Reflecting on the above I do not categorise myself in the above but I do see many teachers still embedding the technology into the curriculum as an electronic version of the teaching they know rather than the teaching of today and the future. It is easy to turn pages into electronic versions or change the output of research into a PowerPoint. Not only is this easy but it is in the comfort zone of 'this is how we have always taught and it has always worked well'. To remain in this zone makes our schools appear like electronic time capsules to children. In their world outside the walls of the school, they are collaborating, communicating, sharing and learning with their friends through their social networking where location is not a barrier. They are creating and producing to an audience: does school reflect this?

Today's technology enables empowerment for all not just those who can or those who will allow. Education has controlled empowerment for many centuries with the teacher being in charge. Teaching in the 21st century is now shifting control to children in a structured environment where a more equal playing field evolves.

What's Your Type?

So according to behavioural pshycologists Dona Dawson who was commissioned to undertake research in social media behaviours at realbuzz, I am an 'enthusiast'. I suppose it it better than being a 'self confessor' or a 'cynical clown'.

There are five different social media behaviours that people personify themselves as with 'philosophers' and 'critics' being the other two. To ascertain which group you belong to you answer a small set of multiple choice questions to reveal your identity.

Now here I was thinking my identity was safe and the real me was hiding, like the wizard fro the Wizard Of OZ, behind a big machine, but in my case hopefully in a more friendlier way. How little did I know that my image was still breaking through the barrier or the screen.

For those that are working with me on many global projects and for those that met me first through Web 2.0 then met me in real life. I wonder if you have a picture in your mind what you think I am. For those that met me, did I come over as a different person or was I still the same. Very interested to know so go on, tell me if I am an 'enthusiast' or if I am portrayed as something different in your mind.

Voices Of The World - January

Voices Of The World has grown from strength to strength with new members from around the world joining the VOTW social network each week. Each month a new task is given to members to connect our children together using their voices and a different tool from the internet.

January's task was to contribute to a collaborative voicethread then create one for the participant's school related to customs. The tasks have strict criterias to ensure that language is not a barrier. Below you can view the collaborative voicethread and to see each individual contribution then go the the VOTW wikispace.

Living Their Lives On-line

Frontline's , an American documentary show, looks into the lives of today's children who are growing up on-line in networked societies. Is this good or bad? In their video, which is well worth a watch, teenagers talk about how the on-line environment appeals to them as no one is telling them what to do as no one is in charge.


According to Frontline, 90% of American teenagers are on-line and this number is growing. For teenagers the Internet is a place for self-expression, a place to complain about their parents/school and a means to connect with one another. Teenagers today, are the first generation to come of age in a virtual world outside the reach of their parents of teachers. Their is a shift from the Internet being controlled by adults to teenagers where they live their lives on-line with their network of friends. It is a place for them to go and hook up as a continuation of their existence. To one boy on the documentary, he related the Internet to being as important as currency as without it you can not survive!







The downside to this immediate virtual world is that classrooms do not represent this fast paced life resulting in many children finding it difficult to stay focused during a traditional lesson.





What is appealing to many children about the Internet is the chance to create a new identity for themselves. The documentary highlights how one girl takes this new identity to an alarmingly new levels to become something she can't be in the really world where she changes from the quiet bullied child to the next goth queen in poses that would better in a male magazine than a fourteen year old's social network page. On the other side of the coin, another girl who is popular with her peers. clever, funny and witty becomes the real her on-line where she can stop hiding behind this 'fun to be with' individual to a quiet, serious girl who can talk openly on-line. As positive as this may sound where it looks like the Internet is allowing someone to be the 'real' person they are, further watching of documentary reveals that this young girl is actually connecting with a network of friends who all believe in anorexia! If is quite shocking and part of you thinks, this can only happen in America, but I am sure this is what happens all over the world.


If you read my blog you will know that I am a true advocate for technology but what I watched next on the documentary was extremely sad where a child committed suicide due to the cyberbullying. Constantly being told he was a loser, gay or made fun of whilst he was desperately trying to fit in with this on-line society, this young boy decided to end his life. To make matters worse, his father found out that his son had communicated with another unknown friend on ways to kill himself looking at suicide sites. Alarming, disturbing, shocking are all the emotions I felt watching this where it appears that children are leading a truly different life from what their parents and teachers know them to be.


There is something about reading words, you read them over and over and truly believe what is in front of you.


It used to be that when a child was bullied they came home to their safe haven away from the bullies, however, the virtual world means that bullying continues within their own home through the technology.

Living in today's world is not easy for today's children. Constantly we hear that children are better off and can ask for nothing with all the playstations, plasma TVs. laptops, mobile phones etc that they have in their possessions, but, do we realise the pressure they have to be seen as accepted by not just lots but many online. In the outside world there are adults who can sometimes spot bullying or problems, however, the on-line life of our children has no concerned adults watching their moves online when they have the door closed in their bedrooms in their connected worlds.

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