Modelling Wiki - A Reflection on Scaffolding Discussions of Different Perspectives

The topic of discussion is mobile phones and whether or not they are useful in an education context. The platform for this discussion is a wiki broken down into six different perspectives. We take a turn at wearing each of the hats and give an opinion based on that perspective.

I feel like I am repeating myself in all my blogs but again I feel that this activity is reflective of constructivism. We are scaffolding thinking through De Bono's Six Thinking Hats and drawing out each others ideas. One persons idea triggers somebody else's idea and so on and so forth. It creates a very active learning environment when a discussion is formed. I do think that constructivism encapsulates elements of cognitivism and there was perhaps a bit of this theory inter weaved into this activity but then again it all comes down to accessing prior knowledge and experience to interpret new found knowledge, sounds pretty constructivist to me.

I ended up getting involved in this wiki at a fairly late stage. It was quite overwhelming to go in and see so many comments had already been posted. I think a definite down fall to using this kind of forum is that there is no moderator. When used in such a large group the same comments get posted over and over using a slightly different mix of words. Original ideas become hard to find. I managed to add what I think is a slightly new angle to the Creative hat and made some small contributions to some other hats but I only wanted to really say something if I thought it added real value to the discussion.

If I were to implement this kind of platform for discussion I would break it down into smaller, more manageable groups. Perhaps there could be more use of the expert jigsaw model where one or two students from each group are assigned the task of being the moderators and compiling similar arguments together. This is a great way to trigger an active discussion amongst students. It would be useful on a topic that the students felt really passionate about. The ideas would be diverse and the beneficial thing about using De Bono's Six Thinking Hats rather than a PMI is that you get such a well rounded discussion with analysis and evalutation on a much broader scale.