RSA #3: Does Collaboration Occur When Children are Learning with the Support of a Wiki?

http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/EJ946618.pdf

                                       

RSA #3: Does Collaboration Occur When Children are Learning with the Support of a Wiki?

The readings in module five discuss online learning communities and how they promote an opportunity for people to collaborate together to share a main objective.  There are many different aspects that contribute to an online learning community in order for it to be successful.  Students and instructors both need to be active/participate in the learning process to foster a collaborative atmosphere.  According to Pallof & Pratt (2007), when teachers actively engage in the learning process, “a web of learning is created.  In other words, a network of interactions between the instructor and the other participants is formed, through which the process of knowledge acquisition is collaboratively created” (p.5). 

Since our cohort uses technology to collaboratively learn from one another, I wanted to find an article that supported children working/learning together using technology.  The article, Does Collaboration Occur When Children are Learning with the Support of a Wiki? (2011) researches many different case studies to determine if students work together using Wiki as a learning tool.  Many different age ranges and ethnically diverse communities were involved in the research.  According to Allsop (2011), “Tools such as email, blogs and chat are acquainted by many teachers. Recent developments such as Wikis and RSS feeds may not be as well known, but offer wide opportunities for online collaboration for learners. They afford many unique and powerful information sharing and collaboration features” (p. 130).  The results showed that Wiki was in fact a powerful collaborative tool in which students were able to learn from one another, while also sharing their own knowledge.

The information presented by Allsop (2011) relates to the information that is presented in the assigned readings for module 5.  After reading about online learning communities, I learned that collaboration between the instructor and learner needs to be equally distributed in order for the process to be effective. In the findings from the research article, students are able to collaborate with one another while using technology.  Both readings correlate to the idea that in a learning community, everyone needs to work together to learn and grow. 

References

Allsop, Y. (2011). Does Collaboration Occur when Children are Learning with the Support of a    

Wiki?, TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10(4), 130-137.

Palloff, R. & Pratt, K. (2007). Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for    the Virtual Classroom, (2nd ed.). San Franciso: Jossey-Bass.