Cultivating+Higher+Order+Thinking+with+Wikis

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toc =Case Study: Using Emerging Web Tools to Develop Higher Order Thinking in Middle School Students=

I am always more interested in "Why?" questions than "How?" questions. Although I'll talk about how this project was set up, I hope I can give a good answer to why it should be done in the first place.

Chapter Abstracts (entire directory)

Abstract
In the early days of the written word, when scrolls and books were labouriously copied out by hand, access to information was restricted to those who could afford the costly books. A big library in the early middle ages might have 150 books. The printing press made information relatively cheap and widely available but created the new challenge of how to find bits of information in all these books--a big library today may have millions of books (the world's largest, the U.S Library of Congress, has 142 million unique titles). In trying to meet these challenges of access and retrieval, we centralized information--and education--around physical spaces such as libraries and schools. We also shifted the focus of learning from the student to the instructor, or the person who had direct access to the store of knowledge and who knew how to pull out information from the store.

In the process, says Marshall MacLuhan, was to lost the context for information and our sense of the way we are connectioned to it both as individuals and as groups. Print cultures like ours have privileged abstract information and emphasized objective analysis. In contrast, pre-literate or oral cultures share information around the campfire, so to speak; learning is participatory and situational rather than abstract.

The emerging digital culture behaves differently and, ironically, starts to look like an ancient oral culture. Social networking and collaboration tools once again put the emphasis on participation and interaction. Individuals can collate, sort and tag information as they wish--in effect creating their own hand-crafted books just as they were made in the days before the printing press. The emphasis shifts from information storage & retrieval to analysis and critique and from instructor back to student.

In the 2008-2009 school year I ran an experiment to test this potential for the read-write web to develop both the capacity and inclination for middle school students to engage in higher order thinking. For the past several years I've led my Grade 9 students through a fairly typical study of Mary Shelley's //Frankenstein//; that is, I gave them study questions, had them write papers and create projects exploring ideas I thought the novel presented. This time, however, I told the class that we were going to make a deep reading of the book first, then decide as a group what was worth discussing.

We took the entire term to read the novel. Each student was responsible for presenting a chapter to the class. This freed the rest of the class to focus on the presentation. After the discussion, the presenter was responsible for posting his or her notes to a class wiki. The rest of the class was asked to make either a "significant contribution" or "constructive modification" to those notes. My job was to act as moderator, to guide the conversation when it threatened to come off the rails and to add background information to the novel that the students couldn't have known.

The use of the wiki freed students from having to worry about note-taking and getting the "right" information; indeed, as we did not yet have a specific question to answer there was no "right" information. Moreover, because we encouraged revisions and edits, it shifted the tone of discussion from finding firm answers to making inquiries. The collaboratively built notes were also more comprehensive than any one student could create and partially replaced me--as the teacher--as an authority on the factual details of the novel.

Students reported they loved the process; the novel was a "page-turner" and they said they had no idea a book could be so rich. I saw a level of participation that was dramatically higher than in previous iterations of the unit. By the time we finished reading, we had dispatched all the standard questions about the novel. Students saw that factual recall was only a starting point in a rich, critical discourse. I was able to say to them, “You know the book quite well, now, and you have a huge store of data in our wiki. What does Shelley ask you to ask yourselves? What do //you// want to know after reading her novel?” Their answer was fresh and engaging: "We know we can't find an answer to this question, but we'd like to explore this: Where do humanity and monstrosity cross?" We went on to read Eli Weisel's //Night// as a way of looking at the question.

Overall, the experiment was a success and vindicated what many claim is the advantage of collaborative work on the web. To be sure, we need to make improvements: we focussed on class discussion and could have developed the wiki notes further. And I would like to see more use of outside sources: we used a Diigo group to gather information on the web, but we didn't integrate these all that well. It would also be interesting to work online with another school. But this will now become part of my standard teaching practice.

Contributors
In the order in which you'd like authors to appear
 * **Family names** || **Given names** ||
 * Ovenell-Carter || Brad ||

Chapter Outline
coming soon

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