Collaborative Creativity Processes In A Wiki

Collaborative Creativity Processes in a Wiki

This paper explores how wiki may be used to support secondary education students' collaborative creativity processes and how such interaction can promote critical and creativity thinking. A science case-based project in which 81 secondary students participated was designed, implemented and evaluated. Students worked in the science wiki project during two weeks. We scaffold students to be collaboratively engaged in purposeful critical and creative discourse in order to solve collectively science challenges and construct meaning about topics related to environmental challenges. Through the analyses of students' contributions in the wiki we have characterized collaborative creativity processes in science inquiry that includes performance (processes to develop a novel way of approaching and understanding the problem) and collaboration (peer collaboration, dialogue). The significance of the paper relays on the operationalization of the collaborative creativity processes in the wiki within four overarching learning to learn together skills, which are: distributed leadership, mutual engagement, peer evaluation and group reflection. Our findings showed that the wiki environment afforded the development of an effective and creative online collaborative learning community. In student's wiki contributions, the four learning to learn together skills took place. However, not all the groups displayed the four learning together skills during their collaboration in the wiki and there were differences among groups in relation to the presence and proportion of these skills. We discuss the contribution of these four learning to learn together skills for the collaborative creativity processes and the relation of the presence of the above mentioned skills with the level of creativity showed in the collaborative writing product students produced in the wiki project. Besides, the paper discusses a series of issues that instructors should consider when wikis are incorporated into teaching and learning for creativity. We claim that embedded scaffolds to help students to argue and reason creatively in their contributions in the wiki environment are needed. [For the complete proceedings, see ED557311.].

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Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms

′We need a solid book explaining and illustrating and letting teachers know about these powerful tools. This book meets the need in an awesome way!′ - Mike Muir, Director, Maine Center for Meaningful Engaged Learning ′This author is a gem! It startles me to be ′pulled′ so happily through a text about these new Web tools in the context of good literacy instruction′ - Gary Graves, Senior Research and Evaluation Advisor, Technology in Education, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory This book brings teachers a bold vision and on-the-ground Monday morning practicality. It will move educators to think differently about technology′s potential for strengthening students′ critical thinking, writing, reflection, and interactive learning. Will Richardson demystifies words like "blog," "wiki," and "aggregator" making classroom technology an easily accessible component of classroom research, writing, and learning. This guide demonstrates how Web tools can generate exciting new learning formats, and explains how to apply these tools in the classroom to engage all students in a new world of synchronous information feeds and interactive learning. With detailed, simple explanations, definitions and how-tos, critical information on Internet safety, and helpful links, this exciting book opens an immense toolbox, with specific teaching applications for: o Web logs, the most widely adopted tool of the read/write Web o Wikis, a collaborative Webspace for sharing published content o Rich Site Summary (RSS), feeding specific content into the classroom o Aggregators, collecting content generated via the RSS feed o Social bookmarking, archiving specific Web addresses o Online photo galleries This book makes it possible for anyone, no matter how inexperienced, to harness this amazing technology for the classroom today!