Reflection of activity two: Wiki

My reflection of activity two will be concerning the development of two wikis. The first wiki which is pxgt6308.wikispaces.com started with a very slow pace and was half way done. Deciding the structure of the wiki took about four weeks and delegation of topics took another two weeks. It became quite a frustrating experience for me when collaboration of ideas was ineffective. Three weeks nearing the due date, Dr Tee came up with a more structured wiki for us to work on, which is learninghaven.wikispaces.com. After being informed verbally of the purpose for developing the wiki , then only I understood that I need to understand how people learn in order to design effective instructions. Indeed, some scaffolding was very much needed at that point of time especially when everyone was still in the dark of what to do and how to proceed in developing the wiki.

Have I contributed enough to the development of wiki? What was the quality of my contribution to the wiki? To answer the first question, I admit that I have not contributed enough in terms of the quantity of the content. If given the time, I would probably contribute more. Answering the second question is hard because culturally, we do not boast about our contributions. However, for the purpose of doing this assignment, I would say, the quality of my contribution is higher in the first wiki as compared to the second wiki.. The reason is simply because I was trying to let others play their part after I initiated the activity for the second wiki since I did not assume myself as the initiator unlike in the first wiki. Besides, it is not easy to measure quality unless you set some standards to match.

The next question is how I could have improved the quality of the content. To improve the quality of the content in the first wiki, I guess I have to look at the organisation of content deductively so that I could identify and understand the bigger picture of the topic before I could identify the smaller parts to work on. The problem then was, we were still unable to focus on the main issue on how people learn but instead roamed around the topic of distance learning. On the other hand, with regard to the new wiki, I guess I have to read more and cite others’ views and work especially in responding to the topics of discussions. Other than that, probably, more pages could be created to present and discuss the topic from the perspectives of different learning theorists namely behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist. Moreover, another page could also be created to share reviews of research findings done by others with regard to how people learn. In-depth discussion on the research findings will add to the weight of the discussion threads.

Last but not least, what have I learned from this activity? First, I was able to experience how difficult it was to collaborate ideas and develop content from a distance involving a lot of heads. For example, to decide on the structure alone took around 5 weeks before we could finalize on the outline. Second, I am more aware about the principles of learning outlined by Driscoll (2002) that learning occurs in context, is active, is social and is reflective. Besides, I am also aware that people from different range of age share some common ground when it comes to learning. They learn best when we set a conducive environment for them to learn which are through actual daily context, through active learning (physically and cognitively), through social interaction with peers and through synthesizing what has been learned by reflecting. Therefore, I must assess my learners learning behaviour to help me identify the best matched instructional strategies to be applied.

I must say that I have actually undergone a contextual learning experience when I have gone through the process of developing the first wiki and participating in resorting to the development of the second wiki. The experience is priceless since I was able to actually go through the whole process of Rapid Prototyping on a contextual basis. Nevertheless, I still strongly believe that developing the wiki should not involve more than four heads. It would be difficult to collaborate since we have to wait for the others for feedback and responses.

To conclude, I gained 80% what I learned by personally experience it. I’ll top up another 20% by doing this reflection.