#pbworks

For this installment I will be using PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) for the first time.I will primarily be looking at the EDUHub, their education facing product; however, organizations in the advertising and marketing industries as well as law firms can make use of the products hosted by PBWorks. Outside of education the tools offered are utilized for partner/client collaboration, new business development, project management, the development of social intranets, and knowledge management. PBWork’s non-educational products include Agency Hub, Legal Hub, and Project Hub which are geared towards marketing, law, and project management respectively. Additionally, PBWorks provides course organization and delivery options to use PBWorks like a cms/classroom webpage, or users can share out a workspace as a collaboration board much like an online whiteboard. 

PBWork’s original and still primary function is to act as a wiki which is essentially a webpage that allows users to collaborate and edit the page in order to share information and sources. The impermanent nature of the page affords itself a conversational tone which encourages users to add related resources and ideas as they learn and research more about the given topic. The ease at which resources are tagged and shared also tends to make wikis an easy repository for sources and planning documents during research.

In my direct line of work as an instructional coach, the first content I think affords itself to the use of wikis is the professional learning involved with learning theory and teaching strategies. Take for example the jigsaw method teaching strategy. There are numerous ways to conduct a lesson using this strategy, and most teachers have some personal variation on how they sequence the splitting up of groups, sharing of expertise, and creating a final product. Having a tag that can be easily searchable allows educators to find examples that they connect with, and then I always find that teachers want to make an idea their own, and a wiki is perfect for adjusting or adding to a shared activity in this way. Using this as a tool for professional learning, I would want teachers to spend part of the session searching through the wikis for lessons or activities that they connect with, discussing their findings with others in-person, and then finally creating their own artifact that they share on the wiki. The cool thing about this type of lesson involving a wiki is the final product could be varied if the teacher is more focussed on the theory and research behind the strategy than creating a lesson they could contribute to that section of the wiki giving a lot of freedom for student choice.    

The use of wikis in the manner I described in the paragraph above is supported by the constructivist learning theory because my activity’s participants would be using their prior knowledge combined with the information contained in the wiki to form their own understanding and in consequence their own version of the wiki (Almala, 2006). Seeing the multitude of examples on the wiki and then using that information to either improve it or create something new would be an example of distribution of cognition which would also lead to a deeper understanding through shared knowledge of the teaching strategy. This understanding and ability to process the knowledge gained would not be as great without the opportunity to collaborate in this manner (Begoña & Carmen, 2011).

Participating in a wiki-centered activity like the one I’ve described helps my learners develop research skills they need outside of a professional learning setting. I’m always interested to see the different ways educators search for content. Some go straight to Google, others use the content included in an LMS or CMS. The biggest advantage of using a wiki within a lesson for my learners is realizing that these knowledge suppositories actually exist. Many of them, as well as myself, grew up in a world where wiki-anything  did not jive with academics. Understanding new strategies for how information is connected, shared, and justified will only help these educators understand how to better serve their own students who no longer live in the anti-wiki past. 

References  

Almala, A.H. (2006). Applying the principles of Constructivism to a Quality E-learning Environment. Distance Learning, 3(1), 33-40.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH_GK9pUdmM)