Mobile Phone Wiki

Last week in e-learning we all had to participate in a discussion wiki. The topic of this discussion was 'Should mobile phones be used in the classroom?' We had to use De bono's six thinking hats to express our opinions. De Bono's six thinking hats are: Black (Negative), Blue (Process), Green (Creative), Red (Intuitive), Yellow (Positive), White (Objective). For more information, I have attached a link where you can read more about the six hats.http://www.kurwongbss.eq.edu.au/thinking/Hats/hats.htm
For this discussion I put on the Negative (Black) hat. The beauty of this wiki and with the thinking hats is that you can 'put on' more than one and have varied opinions. It's also great because once more people have 'put on' a hat and written their opinions in, it can some times change your opinion or at least give you some more to think about an change your view slightly. I thoroughly enjoyed reading every one's opinions about this subject. It still however was not enough to change my opinion from negative to anything else! The only downside with learning this way is that is does require everyone to participate to be able to see the full spectrum of every one's feelings, judgments and opinions.
I do feel that doing these sorts of activities with students in a school setting would work and contribute to their learning. There would need to be a way for the teacher to make sure the students are actually participating though. Which I think would be fairly easy with primary and high school students because most kids do like their opinions to be heard ad this is a pretty good way of doing that.
The learning styles evident in this activity are connectivisim (which I spoke of in last weeks blog) and Constructivism, mainly social constructivism. Constructivism basically is the idea that students knowledge is base on past experiences, beliefs and the way they interpret objects and events. Social Constructivism is learning based on social interactions in learning environments and the idea that understandings grow from social encounters. I feel that this wiki has done that. We each went in with our own experiences and personal perceptions of this topic and through the different opinions expressed by our peers we were able to learn through this social interaction.