Modifying Knowledge

Taking a cue from Darren, the kids in my class are backing working on our wiki. An experiment this year (as I am learning almost all things are), our wiki has been used with each social studies unit we have worked on.

The kids have not been that motivated to add information to our wiki, and they much prefer the personal space of their blogs which they control the design of, and the content in.

Today we discussed the purpose of a wiki and how they should not be discouraged when someone else edits their work as they are actually improving it and adding to our knowledge. I reminded the kids that a wiki is not meant to be their space, but instead is our space, a place where we can put our knowledge together, allowing the best to survive, and that needs improving, to be "exposed," so it can be modified and improved.

We worked yesterday and today on simply adding introductory information. I had given the kids a few topics as an introductory structure (warfare, housing, religion, engineering, connections to modern society, etc.) and then allowed the kids to work where they wanted, on the topics they wanted.

Then today, I gave them Darren's ideas of Significant Contribution and Constructive Modification. The idea being that the kids need to make significant additions to something that is already there or add something completely new in order to "qualify" for a significant contribution. The second category, constructive modification, may simply be reformatting text to make it easier to read and understand. It may be correcting spelling errors, or adding a bit of further information on a topic that exists on the wiki already.

These categories of possible contribution seemed to be something that the kids could understand. It gave them a structure of how knowledge building happens, either in strides, or in the drips and drabs of improving what we already know.  Either way, it is a clearer structure for the kids to work with, and it gives me, as a teacher, a better understanding of how kids can move forward in their understanding of a given topic using a wiki.

technorati tags: pbwiki, wiki, knowledge

Comments

[Darren Kuropatwa]

Hi Clarence,

I've also found that by giving them a conceptual structure on which to pin their thoughts they are able to understand the differing nature of the two types of contribution. The kids think the "Significant Contribution" is the hard part. This week I've explained to them that the purpose of the "Significant Contribution" is there for a variety of reasons, but mainly to enable them to make their "Constructive Modifications" which is the real hard work.

A "Constructive Modification" must be an edit of someone else's work. In order to make a "Constructive Modification" that moves the project forward in a constructive way they have to scan through much of their classmates work. Think about it critically. Assess it for accuracy, clarity and presenation, and then decide what they will do to modify it so that it is better than is was before. The actual content generated this way may be small, in comparison to a "Significant Contribution," but it requires deep metacognition and critical analysis -- an awful lot of thinking.

[Vicki Davis]

Interesting thing, the students in my class like the wiki versus blogging for a couple of reasons. They don't really customize their blog and I have moderation turned on on all comments and blog entries. I do think this causes less motivation.

Our wiki projects have been on a team basis and they see the wikis as useful places for fact. They see blogs as places for opinion. It would be interesting to run some parallel projects and see how students respond.

This is fascinating to me!