Mediating PBL in a Wiki environment (cont’d)
The Need for Skilful Facilitation
Isaksen (1998) noted that a very effective way to overcome potential group problems is to train and deploy a facilitator, as Osborn (1967) had stipulated for successful brainstorming sessions, “A trained facilitator can observe the interaction patterns, energy, and evenness of participation and use appropriate idea-stimulating techniques to support the general guidelines.”
To overcome interaction pitfalls, Kreijns, et al., (2002) proposed a taxonomy of eight elements: (1) appropriate teacher behaviour, (2) appropriate member behaviour, (3) nature of the learning tasks, (4) member roles, (5) task resources: knowledge or physical resources that enable execution of the task, (6) goal definition: describing the purpose of the collaboration, (7) formative evaluation with feedback from peers or from educators, and (8) summative evaluation and reward structure.
This taxonomy provides concrete ‘handles’ for developing relevant pedagogical techniques. For example, Johnson and Johnson (1989) advocated positive interdependence, “the degree to which participants perceive they are interdependent in that they share a mutual fate and that their success is mutually caused” (Johnson & Johnson, 1991b, p. 174). Using or combining primitive factors from the taxonomy such as member roles and goal definition can create positive goal interdependence. (Both cited in Kreijns, et al. 2002.)
There are many more areas to explore and consider in later literature review. For example, to optimize the social affordances of my wiki environment, it could be necessary to plan in more detail how to support instructional activities in the three ways advocated by Jonassen (1978): modeling, coaching, and scaffolding. Modeling involves demonstrating to the learner how (and why) to perform the necessary activities needed to complete a task. For example, provide one or more examples, and then ask the learner to explain his or her reasoning while going through each step. Coaching intervenes at critical points in the instruction to provide the learner with encouragement, diagnosis, directions and feedback. It can be as simple as providing a series of timely pre-programmed hints, or as complex as analyzing what the learner is doing and offering help if the learner seems to be lost. Scaffolding adjusts the task, and possibly systemic factors, for the learner so that the task is matched to what the learner can do. Eventually all scaffolding will be removed.
Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage eModeration model (2000), on the other hand, suggested a progression from motivation and socialization to information exchange, knowledge construction and finally, development. She also pointed out the need to take care of technical support at each stage.
