Mobile Phones Wiki

The mobile phones wiki is a collaborative project, set up by course lecturers and coordinators, using a significant scaffold broadly applied in the education sector: De Bono's Hats. This scaffold has benefits for both my own learning as a pre-service teacher and those of students, as it can be applied in classroom contexts for school students, or in TAFEs, universities or training colleges.

For my own learning , the use of De Bono's Hats assisted in dissection of the topic (mobile phones in classrooms), with a great deal of information brought into the wiki and formation of focused ideas relative to the debates surrounding the topic.  On this topic, as expected, I easily wore the 'black hat' and recognized many problems with integrating mobile phones in the classroom.  But in 'putting on' the other coloured hats representing different perspectives of the topic and reading other points of view, a new and slightly evolved perspective was synthesized.  As a result, my own perspective changed slightly but significantly.  The argument I had before the De Bono exercise: mobile phones should be kept out of classrooms because of the inherent risks and inequities to integrating their uses in any student cohort.  My new perspective (post-De Bono exercise): mobile phones could be used in class context if sufficient resources and broadly applied guidelines for responsible use in schools are available.  It should be noted that my aversion to mobile phones at school is coloured somewhat by my current employer, Education Queensland, which has a no phone policy for students at school.  I believe the legal considerations underpin this policy.

The mobile phone wiki, and use of De Bono's Hats as a scaffold for the wiki as a collaborative forum, holds some promise for the learning of my (future) students.  Given that the hats enable synthesis of perspectives, and more than one student has editorial and contributing access, the collective produced a diversity of ideas extensively covering the debate. 

The collaborative nature of the mobile phone wiki, as well as the real-world focus, indicates that the exercise is a predominantly constructivist learning strategy. The whole of the perspectives is no doubt greater than that of the sum of the individual parts.  It is plausible that not one of us in the course could have synthesized the information now present in the whole wiki.  However, in reading the collective of responses, the tyranny of the majority is present, as there seems to be present a centripedal dynamic in the constructivist exercise which compelled some contributors to move there opinions to somewhere in the middle between support and rejection of mobile phones in classes.  I know I certainly was one of these contributors.

So by nature of the collaboration, the range of opinions and ideas has served the diversity of the group.  Some of us have been pro-mobile use (ie. the barriers should be overcome so as to engage modern learners with the technology they use almost every day).  Some of us remain anti-mobile phone use (i.e. the risks are too great, the ethics not socially & culturally established, the resources not yet devoted, the technology is not equitably available or distributed, the health risks unknown or too great, etc).    

As an online e-learning activity, I believe wikis and De Bono's hats do have some promise.  Wikis alone can give the teacher great insight into the breakdown of students thought processes, furnishing insight to each students background and their knowledge of the topic.  The knowledge is shared among the group and assists those learners who did not consider particular insights.  I for one was enlightening by those brave enough to reject mobile phone based upon health risks.  In hindsight, given the opportunity to add another risk into the mix of negatives, I would add 'environmental' risks.  The amount of mobile phone waste that is building up around the world is significant and recycling is not always cost effective...so hang on, I will go back and edit that risk in!  (Another beauty of wikis is ability to edit, but modifications can be undone by moderators or other contributors too).

As indicated earlier, De Bono's Hats is a good scaffold for gaining a collaboration of perspectives on a topic, but it is probably more suited to high school student cohorts.  The hatted points of views are problem centred approaches, so if integrated with an e-learning strategy, they certainly can assist in establishing a foundation for group projects.  At some points a teacher may return to each or any of the 'hats' so as to focus perspectives of students and to help guide them if they were off-task or off-topic.  The' hats' also provide a powerful platform for the students to be assertive and even make persuasive arguments about their idea/s and how their idea/s is relevant.  Occasionally teachers themselves are taught/persuaded about a point of view by the students and perhaps accept an idea as being relevant they'd previously discounted as irrelevant. I do believe that the e-learning possibilities are considerable with using De Bono's hats.  But as a scaffold to the  technology, De Bono's hats removes the limiting factor of ICTs simply being a tool (i.e. a transparent ICT like a photocopy or OHP), but an advance learning strategy. 

Note: Both the wikis and the De Bono exercise is highly compatible with my own 'Integrated eLearning' framework from the previous post.  Particularly as there is a significant outside audience, i.e. future students, and the exercise is channeled towards real-world experiences, preparing us for taking up the role of teachers.