Técnica e instrumentos

Collaborative scripts in small groups could be carried out using simple, non-technological tools, such as post-it notes and large sheets of paper, with the teacher manually assigning students to groups. However, in a larger class, with more complex scripts, it becomes unfeasible to

orchestrate the class without the support of technology. In addition to enabling the orchestration of complex patterns of grouping and interchange of ideas and materials, collaborative

technologies have specific affordances for learning which will be discussed in Chapter 6. In addition, the topic of the class was how to use technologies to support inquiry learning, and thus the hands-on experience with these same technologies was very important for student

experiential learning. Below, I will briefly present the technologies which played a key role in this course.

4.2.7.1 Wiki platform

The digital content of the course was organized largely through the use of a wiki platform called Confluence, which has several affordances that support our learning design goals. Many

traditional wikis use a special form of markup to edit pages, which presents a hurdle for

beginners. Confluence wiki has a WYSIWYG interface (What You See is What You Get), which makes it much easier for students to begin editing pages. The pages are rich media documents which can contain different fonts and colours, tables (very useful for coordinating multiple responses), as well as embedded pictures, videos, and even other custom rich elements.

The wiki is organized into spaces, and each user automatically gets their own personal space, which is by default only visible to themselves, and the wiki administrator (in this case, the instructors). This space was used for weekly reflections, and to distribute personalized links and instructions as part of the pedagogical scripts. The whole class had a single large space

(differentiating it from other courses or communities), but within that space, we could assign students to groups with different access rights.

There are a number of features that support organizing pages and exploring content. Students can view a list of all pages in a certain space, or use the search functionality to look for specific content. Pages can also have tags and categories to promote discovery, and within a given page, an automatic table of contents can be generated based on headers, for easier internal navigation.

4.2.7.2 Concurrent editing

A major weakness of wiki platforms for collaborative work is that they only allow a single user to edit a given page at a given time. There is no real-time collaboration option, and when students edit the same page concurrently, they run the risk of overwriting each other’s versions, and loosing information. Thus we chose several other tools for supporting live collaboration during class time. Initially, we used Google Documents (both the text editor, and the

spreadsheet), and later we transitioned to Etherpad, which is an open-source tool that we ran from our own servers. It presents an interface that is much more simple than Confluence wiki, or Google Docs, with no differentiation of fonts, embedding of rich media etc. Instead, it is focuses on coordinating collaboration, with text coloured differently depending on who typed it, an online presence indicator, and an embedded chat tool.

4.2.7.3 Other tools

Given the technology-related focus of the course, we frequently introduced and employed other web-based tools, either as part of demonstrations relating to the specific weekly themes, or for specific pedagogical purposes. For example, we used Google Forms to conduct quick surveys, and also to quickly collect and populate tables during class. We also experimented with audience feedback tools, collaborative drawing/collage tools, Smartboards and other technologies.

4.2.7.4 Integrating tools through APIs and scripts

Most of the tools we employed were not designed specifically for teaching and learning, and even those that were (e.g., the audience response systems like Poll Everywhere), were not designed to be integrated with other tools within a broader workflow of activities. However, many of these tools offer an Application Programming Interface (API) which provides a

connection point through which two programs or tools can communicate directly. Using custom scripts written in the Python language, we were able to obtain a degree of control over these tools through these APIs, allowing them to be integrated with other tools and environments and

thereby embody our pedagogical script in the technology environment.

For example, we were able to automatically create user accounts for various tools (i.e.,

generating the accounts automatically) using the personal information (name and email) they had entered through the initial survey during the first class. Further, students could be automatically grouped into special interest groups with appropriate access permissions based on their

teachables. Each week, scripts were used to automatically create templated Etherpad documents with discussion prompts for each discussion group. After the in-class discussion, the content was automatically moved from the Etherpads, and inserted into the group wiki space, for historical reference.

Each week, we inserted reflection prompts into students' personal wiki spaces. Then, once students had written their reflections in response to these prompts, the resulting data were extracted and collated in a Google Spreadsheet, where the instructor could easily read several weeks' worth of reflections from each student, and leave appropriate comments, which were in turn automatically posted to their personal spaces.

4.3 Enactment

In this section, I present the enactment of our course. It is important for any design-oriented research to present and evaluate not only the design (i.e., whether it embodies the targeted

theoretical perspective, etc.), but also the enactment of that design—whether it was even possible to implement what was designed, and to what extent the implementation adhered to the intended vision.

It is also through the enactment that we may gain insights into the design itself, prompting revisions and informing take-away findings about the overall success, as well as possible

generalizations and design principles. Hence, this section first introduces some basic measures of success, to confirm that indeed students engaged with our course, completed the required

activities, and enjoyed an overall positive experience.

A short discussion of the orchestration of the activities, which was distributed between the instructor and the technology environment, is also provided.

4.3.1 Demographics

The course had 74 students, 45 female and 29 male. Most had less than one year of experience teaching, but there was a minority with several years of experience, as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14 - Student demographics

The students were part of the either Primary-Junior (PJ), Junior-Intermediate (JI), Intermediate- Senior (IS) or the Technology stream, and had a wide range of teachables, Figure 15.

Figure 15 - Student teachables and age groups