Week 2 - Reflection One - Mobile Phone Wiki Activity

The mobile phone wiki activity provided a scaffolded system of learning which facilitated the expansion of each students perspectives on a topic through the incorporation of De Bonos Six Thinking Hats. The 'thinking hats' provide a system that asks for contributions to a topic based on facts, creativity, possible problems, process, feeling and benefits. This system allows learners to experience the necessity of thinking outside of what may be their comfortable view. Students, while providing responses to the scaffolded questioning incorporated by the use of De Bono Hats, expand their own knowledge of the topic by implementing high order thinking skills using the exploation of different perspectives to provide information. These perspectives may have them arrive at a different opinion than when first confronted with the topic question. At first students may find that different personality types may tend towards one particular hat or perspective. For example, a more pessimistic person might see things from a very ‘black hat’ or problem driven perspective, and when asked to then try to see things through a creative or positive perspective they may react quite differently to the topic.

The students had the ability to extend their thinking through the varying of their own perspective, but also had the opportunity to view the  responses of the other students. With this aspect of the activity the social constructivist theory is supported which allows students to not only rely upon their own views and opinions, but also those of their fellow students. This type of support encourages further analysing of the topic as students are able to decide if they agree with what their peers have said, but it also opens them up to ideas that they may never have thought of and provides the opportunity to explore those contributions further.

For me, this type of scaffolded questioning allowed me to really focus my own thought processes. Instead of choosing a positive or negative stance from the onset of the topic I was able to research and justify the information from the different perspectives. This particular activity created a well rounded view of the topic with answers to potential questions that may arise when faced with this question in reality.