Profile Wiki

The online profile wiki was an activity that seemed to be a digital icebreaker instead of the traditional face-to-face meeting to ask about personal details. The advantage of a wiki is that the 50 odd students around Australia can look up the individual profiles anytime day or night for information. This activity is already being completed around the world through social networks such as Facebook. I chose my partner Stephen, who has since withdrawn from the course, based on location mostly because we both prefer to communicate face-to-face. In a teaching environment this strategy would be familiar to most students and minimal introduction would be required. When I wanted to know something about Stephen I just looked at his profile and there was all the information I required with a click of a mouse. The only information I recalled freely was leisure activities we had in common. I think this is a great wiki to encourage cognitive development in students by having them recall information about their colleagues or remembering how to establish or edit wikis. Teachers could slowly take away certain particulars on the wiki to invoke recall. Cognitive load theory is concerned with techniques for reducing working memory load in order to facilitate the changes in long-term memory (Sweller, n.d., para. 4).

Watson (n.d., para. 2) believed that all individual differences in behaviour were due to the different experiences of learning. Since I had never created a wiki nor worked in pairs to submit an activity to a wiki and then report on the wiki, I was frustrated in the beginning and developed a negative response from my experience. Curiosity got the better of me so I searched the forums to see other people’s responses and discovered that some enjoyed the experience while others did not and I wondered why? My experience improved using the PMI. The experience was stimulating and I rather enjoyed breaking down my reading into clearly defined steps. I have struggled with summarising text and the PMI is a great tool in assisting the analysis of readings.