COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITY WIKI

Collaborative Educational Activity (WIKI )

Title of the Activity: Wikis to stimulate research at NNMC

Description of Activity: In a wiki-based activity, participants work to collaboratively construct a document designed to meet educational and research objective.

Introduction
Wiki pages are easy to create, search, edit, view, and access from any location at any time.

Activity Goal and Objectives

Goal
The goal of a wiki activity is to allow participants (in this case: researchers at NNMC) to learn and demonstrate that learning through the collaborative document creation.

Objectives
By the end of this activity, participants will:
1. Be able to create a wiki for research team collaboration
2. Be able to post a document, and format text with a wiki editor (embed links, import images, etc).
3. Work collaboratively with other participants to better understand and succeed at group process (identify and provide quality feedback to discussion postings)
4. Learn more about the selected topic of posted document, express and share ideas, suggest improvements to current processes.
5. Synthesize a collective work into a team project, post it on wiki.

Appropriate Content Areas: All

Prerequisites:
Participants need to have the pre-existing knowledge related to the content on the given topic.

Materials and Resources:
The instructor needs to create a wiki space for the activity.
The participants need Internet access to the wiki space.

Lesson Outline and Procedure:
1. The instructor creates a wiki space for the participants.

2. Within that wiki space, participants collaboratively create a document on a given topic:
• One of the participants (Team Lead) will post a document (wiki page) for a team collaborative work (document editing)
• Participants edit a document /wiki page (please see instructions provided below): click on the edit tab on the green bar at the top of the page ;
make the changes you want to the fields and click the save button.
Detailed instructions on how to create a wiki page are available at http://www.umich.edu/~umctdocs/Wiki.html

3. The completed project (group document) can be shared with a larger group, peer reviewed by the fellow researchers, directly assessed by the instructor, and often serves as a continual resource for the students.

Examples:
From http://nnmcresearch.wikispaces.com/Collaborative+Project_+RCRS+Data

Teaching Strategies:
• Provide clear instructions on wiki use (include exactly what a wiki is)
• For the first wiki assignment, provide a little extra time as participants become used to working with the new tool.
• The instructor contributes directly to the wiki: provides guiding questions within the wiki, adds headings that the participants need to complete with information.

Guiding Questions for this Activity(Collaborative Project_RCRS Data):
What do we already know about research completion during 2006-2008? How does question 1 relate to question 2? If we change some policies (# of IRB revisions required) can the research completion data be improved? How we can promote research at NNMC?

Timeline:
Wiki activities can be ongoing throughout a term of a project. Some activities (post a document) may only take 5 minutes, other activities (edit document) may take 15 min to 24 hours for participants to add to a collective document. Normally, a collaborative project within a wiki may take 2-10 hours to complete (when participants are not obligated with other activities)

Lesson Evaluation:
How did the participants like the activity?
End of activity evaluations should ask the following:
- usefulness and learning accomplished through the wiki activity;
- how the participants are enjoying various aspects of the wiki activity;
- are the participants learning and/or participating.

Participants learning will be verified by completion of activity based on the activity rubric

Participation can be assessed in group exercises or discussion session.

A rubric can also be set up by instructor to understand grading criteria of this activity; Team Work Rubric Generator is available at http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/

Additional Readings:
• Augar, N., Raitman, R. & Zhou, W. (2004). Teaching and learning online with wikis. Paper presented at the ASCILITE Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education 2004 Conference. Perth, WA.
• Educational wikis (2007). Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/
• Farmer, J. (2004, June 10). The wide world of wiki: Choosing a wiki for an element of a fully online undergraduate course, Incorporated Subversion, Retrieved January 18, 2007, from http://radio.weblogs.com/0120501/2004/06/10.html
• Giles, J. (2005) Internet encyclopaedias go head to head Nature, 438, 900-901 (15 Dec 2005). Peer Review: Comparison of errors in 50 Britannica and Wikipedia articles
• Lamb, B. (2004). Wide open spaces: Wikis, ready or not. Educause Review, 39(5). pp. 36-48. Retrieved January 18, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp
• Mader, S. (2007). A wiki-based book. Retrieved January 18, 2007, from http://www.wikiineducation.com/display/ikiw/Home
• Mader, S. (2005). OpenSpectrum: A Wiki-based learning tool for Spectroscopy that anyone can edit Paper presented at the Winter 2005 CONFCHEM: Trends and New Ideas in Chemical Education - an online conference Jan-Feb 2005.
• Wiki's wild world Nature, 438, 890 (15 December 2005)

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Assignment #4, Reflection on Learning: Final Thoughts

Prompt #1

What are some specific challenges that you foresee in implementing the initiative you developed? How do you plan to overcome them?

Biggest challenge in stimulating research is Organizational Culture Change.

Organizational Culture Change is difficult because it was formed over years, and people feel very comfortable in the old settings. However, organizational culture change is possible.

Culture change requires understanding, commitment, and tools.
Our organization went through the first two steps, understanding and commitment;
now it’s time to educate about and implement new Web 2.0 tools that allow and support collaborative learning and interdepartmental interaction.

Recourses:
http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture_change.htm
http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture.htm


Prompt #2

Thinking about all we covered in this course, in addition to implemeting your initiative, how will you continue to develop 21st century literacy skills in the students that you serve.

My plan for continuous development 21st century literacy skills includes the following:
Have clear annual development goals;
have clearly defined task;
provide continuous education, training and implementation of appropriate tools; assess and evaluate annual development;
come up with the improvement steps.

Prompt # 3


What other thoughts and ideas do you have for developing future e-learning initiatives in your teaching and learning environment?


New thoughts and ideas for developing future e-learning initiatives will be selected based on the first year assessment. Participants should not be overwhelmed with new initiatives.

Assignment #4: Reflections on Learning:Team Facilitation Activities:Post #3

Prompt #3:

- Which of the two activities developed by the other team was the most relevant and meaningful to you, and why?

Two activities developed by Team’s Think Tank were the most relevant and meaningful to me:

- Team Activity – Providing Feedback:

This activity taught me how to provide feedback by using Nicholson's Rubric. I have learned that rubric should be shared with the students before they start to work on the activity; and instructor’s feedback ALWAYS should be non-judgmental, positive, encouraging, and stimulating lifelong learning!

- ZOHO Presentation - Providing Feedback in Online Learning Communities:

This presentation introduced new software (ZOHO), and summarized information on Feedback: Quality Feedback, Why is Feedback Important, Types of Feedback, Role of Feedback in Instruction, Tips on Incorporating Peer Feedback. It is a great reference!

Assignment #4: Reflections on Learning:Team Facilitation Activities:Post #2

Prompt #2:

- To what extent did the activities developed by the other team promote engagement and higher order thinking?
- Were their directions clear?
- Was there anything that you thought could have been improved?

Engagement, associated with higher order thinking, derived from the project design:
our team was offered unique opportunity to learn about the feedback process through the use of educational software programs in collaborative environment.
Trough the provided Threaded Discussion Example we were introduced to the team discussion on how technology changes over time. We have learned about different behavioral roles of team members (Instructor of an online writing clas, Student A, Student B, Student C, & Student D), their different styles of response, and assessed students’ work using Nicholson's Rubric.

The directions were absolutely clear.

I would not suggest improving anything: the Team Activity - Providing Feedback - was designed splendidly! I specifically like optional text: Methods of Feedback available at http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/eds/documents/feedback_methods.pdf

Thank you, Team ThinkTank!

Assignment #4: Reflections on Learning:Team Facilitation Activities:Post #1

Propmpt #1:
- To what extent did the team faciliation activities you and your team developed promote engagement? Promote higher order thinking? How do you know?

Answer:

- Purpose of the Team facilitation activities is to make learning experience richer by moving away from didactic forms of teaching. Online technologies and community engagement strategies help to promote higher order thinking, and therefore help to promote learning.
The team facilitation activity is a strategy that helped us to be engaged in course content through activity design. Designing this activity encouraged our team to brainstorm ideas, collect information, research and analyze available resources, assess and create solutions.

This activity taught me a valuable lesson:
- If I would design the Team Facilitation Activity in the future, I will be carefully choosing moderating techniques that provide comfortable environment for students’ participation in online communications and activities.
“ Students will not engage fully unless the environment is non-threatening and they feel it is safe to do so” (Ambrose 2001).

Resources:
- Effective Online Facilitation Guide, available at
http://pre2005.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/facilitation.html;

- What is Facilitation? by James Neill (2004), available at http://wilderdom.com/facilitation/FacilitationWhatIs.html;

- Priest & Gass' (1997) Six Generations of Facilitation, available at http://wilderdom.com/facilitation/PriestGass1997SixGenerationsFacilitation.html