Pedagogy+and+Google+Wave

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Google Wave is a collaborative tool with important implications for educators around the world. It has the potential to enable educators to introduce collaborative practices to their classrooms everyday, as well as facilitating teacher collaboration on curriculum and professional development. =Collaboration and Best Practice in New Zealand= The Ministry of Education commissioned a report by Alton-Lee (2003) regarding Quality Teaching for Diverse Students. He outlines 10 characteristics of quality teaching. Of these 10 characteristics, three can be optimised and effectively managed using collaborative tools such as Google Wave. These are outlined and described in terms of how collaboration tools may help to achieve each characteristic of quality teaching. O nline collaboration allows teachers to interact in a timely and un-obtrusive manner. Teachers may track student work, comments, and peer interactions. They can comment and contribute in real-time (such as during class), or during administrative time. Teacher comments may be whole-class or to individuals. Google Wave allows both synchronous and asynchronous communication and messages may be posted to an individual student or to the whole group. Collaborative tools used for in-class group work or whole-class knowledge construction fosters a creative, and collaborative class environment. When individual student learning is contingent on effective group-work, students must learn to recognise differences and diversity to be an effective group member. Traditional teacher-centered modes of classroom instruction are passive - the teacher gives the student the information. When collaborating, students must create knowledge. This is typically active-learning. Those students who construct the knowledges and participate in the collaboration will be actively learning, where as those who simply read other's work will be passively learning, which may not be as effective. Using collaboration as a key classroom and homework tool necessitates that both students and teachers are active participants in an online learning community. It can also involve the parents and local community, and even reach out to like-minded national and global communities. It is possible to invite an number of participants to a Wave. They do not need to be part of the same institution, town, or even country. Traditional collaboration methods can be difficult to monitor in terms of individual contributions. Online collaborations require the same interactions and communication skills that face-to-face group work requires (and the skills used differ greatly depending on the task set), but individual contributions are easily tracked and monitored. Google wave is made for collaboration and allows teachers to track the contributions of students in group projects. When completing online peer-group-collaborations, students are required to assist each other in identifing, interpereting, and explaining concepts, terms, and resources. This allows them to create meaning about the topics, and also practice key skills such as researching and critical-thinking.  __Characteristic #7 - Curriculum goals, resources including ICT usage, task design, teaching and school practices are effectively aligned.__
 * __Characteristic #2 - Pedagogical practices enable classes and other learning groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities.__**
 * "Caring and support is generated through the practices and interactions of teacher(s) and students."
 * "Teachers use class sessions to value diversity, and to build community and cohesion."
 * " Teaching and tasks are structured to support, and students demonstrate, active learning orientations."
 * "Pedagogical practices create an environment that works as a learning community."
 * "Teaching includes specific training in collaborative group work with individual accountability mechanisms, and students demonstrate effective co-operative and social skills that enable group processes to facilitate learning for all participants."
 * "Students help each other with resource access and provide elaborated explanations."


 Online collaboration tools provide opportunities for students to participate in a diverse range of activities. Opportunities such as real-time language exchanges may not be available through other means. Also students are asked to communicate with each other through a written/typing format. This requires students to further develop their ICT confidence and skills, and literacy and reading ability. While many ideas are focused on how students and classrooms will use this work, it cannot be ignored that one of the greatest uses for online collaboration is for teachers, particularly those in isolated schools, or small departments to interact, and collaborate on curriculum development and resources. It will also enable working parties within schools or departments to collaborate on resources where demanding and full class schedules limit the ability of teachers to work together on projects. While there are still some families who don't have internet access, libraries, schools, and cafes have accessible and affordable internet access nationwide. As students take work home, this allows parents to see what students are engaging in. A collaborative tool that teachers are also able to see and interact with, provides valuable evidence of student learnings and thought processes that can be used to provide feedback to students and parents.
 * "Whole school alignment optimises opportunity to learn, particularly in language immersion, literacy, ICT, social studies and health. "
 * "Whole school alignment enables a common language, teacher collaboration and reflection and other synergies around improving teaching."
 * "School policies and practices initiate, and support teachers in maintaining, school-home partnerships focused on learning."


__Characteristic #9 - Pedagogy promotes learning orientations, student self-regulation, meta-cognitive strategies, and thoughtful student discourse__

Collaborative tools which allow students to contribute using a range of media such as video, written, spoken, or by a conversation allows students with diverse orientations to contribute in a style that suits them. When working on projects as an independent learning group, it is necessary that students self or peer regulate. The transparency for teachers allows them to monitor progress and provide further support, feedback, and feedforward if students are not on track. Such tools may give transparency to thought-processes, disscussion development, or problem-solving techniques of students - particularly when a task is completed ONLY through online collaboration. Teachers, students, and peers can look back after a task has been completed and identify techniques that were used and reflect on the process that took place in an objective manner. There is a clear record of who said what, and when things happened to give evidence and concrete reflection. Interacting with peers and the wider community allows students to critically analyse other works, and content. By considering the validity of others contributions, and www content, students must critically analyse the source and usefulness of this information they find. In making the process visible, links between effort and accomplishment become visible. Students can compare and contrast individual effort with that of their peers and consider what those efforts lead to in terms of the resulting level of achievement and understanding.
 * "Quality teaching promotes learning orientations and student self-regulation."
 * "Teaching promotes metacognitive strategy use (e.g. mental strategies in numeracy) by all students."
 * <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">"Teaching promotes critical thinking."
 * <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">"Teaching makes transparent to students the links between strategic effort and accomplishment."

=Research specific to Wave and Education= As it is such a new tool, little formal research has been conducted on how Wave will impact teaching and education. There are however significant numbers of people who are discussing and creating new knowledge around waves and education within Google Wave itself. Joanna Hane (2009) wrote a discussion paper on the usefulness of Google Wave as a CSCL (Computer Supported Collaboration Learning) tool. She discusses both pedagogical advantages to using the Wave as a classroom tool, as well as the practicalities limitations of the tool. I have summarised these advantages and disadvantages below. Advantages Disadvantages =How Google Wave Aligns with a Futuristic View of Education= Jane Gilbert (2005), suggests that as the paradigm around knowledge changes, so too, enevitably, must education. She discusses how, as world societies move from being 'industrial' in nature to being 'knowledge societies', our concept of what knowledge is, changes. As the amount of information available globally increases exponentially, the value placed on different types of knowledge changes. A knowledge society values the knowledge of a person who is able to locate, process, and disseminate information, over that of one who can store and regurgitate large amounts of information. This key change means that the education system must change, not in a minor way, but in a whole system re-think to meet the changing state of our global society.
 * Wave participants can collect thoughts and other resources together in a single wave which acts as a living document. Teacher/facilitator can comment and give feedback as the document is being created.
 * "Playback Mode" allows teachers and students to view how the wave developed. Teachers gain insight into group dynamics, students cognitive processes, and can give evidence based feedback/feedforward. Students can reflect on their role within a group, and consider their contributions metacognitively.
 * Participants can contribute synchronously or asynchronously, meaning those who cannot attend a real-time discussion are able to "participate" using playback mode, and still make their changes and comments to the discussion at a time which better suits them.
 * Waves can be tailored to suit group needs by adding bots or gadgets to the wave, it allows students to be creative and to use multi-disciplinary skills when participating.
 * Currently there is no way to create different levels of write access within a wave. That is, if you create a wave, anyone who participates can edit any part of the wave. There are obvious situations and reasons you may not want students changing the wave or parts of the wave (eg vandalism, assignment instructions, passive "view the on-going discussion and comment" actvities etc).
 * The current structure of waves can become very messy with more than 10 participants contributing to the wave. It may be easy to miss important information and difficult to distinguish key content from mindless chatter.
 * Waves can become slow when there are large numbers of participants, multiple bots, and numerous gadgets contained within. There are also many bugs with the product. As it is still in a preview stages, it is expected that there will be fixes to most of these bugs in the official version.
 * Waves don't disappear easily. You may trash the wave from your individual inbox, but as long as one of the participants (and there are up to 1000 on some public waves) is still using the wave, it will still be available for new participants to join.<span class="__wave_paste">

// "An important first step, I think is to abandon the production-line model of education and look for new metaphors. We need to emphasise multiplicity, diversity, and connectivity, not linearity, uniformity, and autonomy. We need an education system that develops people's ability to connect with one another, work together across their differences, and add value to each other. (Gilbert, 2005, p.68)" //

Collaborative learning, and other Web 2.0 tools are the first step for many individual teachers to be able to implement aspects of this new knowledge paradigm into everyday teaching practices. Wave specifically faclitates diversity and connectivity amongst participants, as well as requiring partipants to filter, and process large amounts of information into a meaningful and accessible format.