StigmergicWeb

A grade 11 biology class that I teach has been involved in an interesting project that I’ve meant to pass along to you. The course objectives include a study of classification of organisms and a study of some basic ecological principles. I wanted to combine these two into a long term project for the course on the study of species at risk, a topic that I think is only going to be of increasing concern as the effects of climate change begin to manifest in increasingly dramatic ways.

But I didn’t want to do the standard go-to-the-library-and-research-then-hand-in-a-report sort of project. I want to concentrate more on the process of the research than the product. To be honest, I still don’t know what I want to do as a final product. My students find this vaguely disorienting since they seem to be very focused on whatever that final product is. To be completely honest, I also hate marking essays, so if I will avoid it if I can.

In consultation with Donna DesRoches, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, we came upon the idea of having the students create a pathfinder - a sort of expert guide for a topic - to document their research process. We’re using a couple of tools for doing this:

• Wikka Wiki - a very robust, easy to use, easy to install wiki engine. One of the most important features of it is that it can easily integrate an RSS feed so that as the feed is updated, updates are automagically made on the wiki. It also provides RSS feeds for pages so that changes can be monitored and wiki-spammers can be thwarted. Wiki-spam actually hasn’t been a problem (we’ll see how it holds up once the URL to the project is posted). A pathfinder template page was created so that students can paste it into the pages for their species at risk.
• Scuttle - a free (beer and speech) social bookmarking tool. Similar to del.icio.us in many ways such as tagging, but we have the luxury of being able to resrict access to the school community so that there is no tag-poisoning by spammers. Scuttle can, like del.icio.us, create an RSS feed for a tag, so that it can be integrated into the student’s pathfinder on the wiki. You can download Scuttle and install it on your own server, and there is a small but growing Scuttle documentation wiki.

The students have each picked a species at risk from a list I posted on the Pathfinder wiki. They registered on the wiki to be able to edit it (take that, wiki spammers!), copied the student Pathfinder template to their species page, and started the research process. I had them focus on reference resources, especially print resources, for the first two days. After about a week back in the class, we went back to the library and I showed them how to bookmark, tag and comment web resources using Scuttle. The next session, I showed them how to integrate the RSS feed into their wiki page.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll have them do as a final product for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards having the work in pairs to prepare and present to an elementary classroom on one of the species they have researched, but I’m open to suggestions.

Links:

• Species at Risk Pathfinder research wiki assignment page
• Pathfinder template (thanks to Donna for putting this together)
• Species at Risk pathfinder list - links to students work. Some notable ones are:
  • Nilgiri Tahr
  • Peregrine Falcon

I’ve told my students I would publicize their research. If you have any comments, you could leave them here, or on the wiki pages.

We were never really gone, actually, just all extremely busy. I think the conversation is worth the wait!

EdTech Posse Podcast #13 - Why is this worth doing in schools?

Dave Winer explains What is an unconference? Here’s the pithy quote:

My guess is that if you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting.

How absolutely true. With some exceptions, I’ve always found the conversations amongst the audience and with the presenter after a conference presentation are far more engaging than the presentation itself. An unconference is a nice technique for changing a presentation back into a meaningful dialogue. I also think that the change from a traditional presentation to an unconference is similar to the change from an instructivist approach to a connectivist approach in learning. Our classrooms should also be unconferences.

After a great deal of badgering, cajoling and bribery, I’m pleased to announce that my friend and colleague Donna DesRoches is now blogging at The Illuminated Dragon. Donna and I enjoy having many heated discussions about many issues involving educational technology and now we can bring our debates to the public! Donna also has a variety of skills and areas of expertise that will make her blog worth putting on your aggregator list.

For her first post, entitled Playing to Learn, Donna has shared some thoughts about a presentation we are working on for our staff about the social web. (Call for ideas coming shortly) Donna points out some interesting differences of opinion between us and others about our attitudes towards learning, and she asks four very important questions:

Shouldn’t teachers play with new knowledge and information? Why should learning be serious work? Is this the feeling we impart to our students about learning? If teachers cannot find joy in learning is it possible to create students who are life-long learners?

I’ve often felt there’s a bit of a divide amongst teachers on this issue. I’ve always made it a priority in all of the classes I teach that I’m having fun; if I’m not having fun, I don’t think anyone else can. Many times students are labelled as being lazy or not willing to put in the effort. When I watch some of the same students, though, practicing tricks on a skateboard or playing a game, it seems quite apparent that they are willing to put significant time and effort into some very difficult problems. One of the differences, obviously, is fun - it is expected that someone will have fun while they are practicing a trick on a skateboard or learning a new video game. Fun is built into the design of these problems. So why can’t fun be built into what we do in classrooms? Perhaps even more important, and I think this is what Donna was alluding to, why is it assumed that what we learn while having fun is of lesser value than what we learn while being sombre and ernest?

I’ve only skimmed this and it looks phenomenally cool - The Socratic Method

I found this interesting for two reasons. The first is that I teach computer networking, and one of the lessons every year with the grade 10 class is on binary math. I approach it in almost the same way, although I fill in a lot more of the details and do a bit less asking of questions. I think that the method described is a very powerful way to get students thinking about and understanding binary math, which is actually quite logical and comprehensible once you start to think your way through it.

The second thing that caught my attention is the discussion shows how learning can occur in a social context, even for something like mathematicsw that is usually not conceptualized as being a social learning activity. One on one, completely individualized instruction is usually thought by many to be the peak of effective learning. In my experience, it is quite the opposite, even in something like mathematics. Good questions will engage students and get them thinking. An individual student might not be able to come up with the answer to every question; only rarely will a student know the answer to everything you ask (and if they already knew, did you teach them anything? I’ll leave that for another time). In a group of students, however, it is almost guaranteed that if you ask the right questions and proceed logically in small enough steps, someone in the group will give an answer to every question. This method of teaching draws out the implicit knowledge of the group, and makes it clear and explicit for everyone to understand. Good teachers, perhaps without realizing, do this all the time.