He Can't Think Without His Hat - Samuel Beckett

For this weeks wiki task, we were required to put on DeBono's figurative thinking hats and participate in a wiki activity on the topic of 'Should mobile phones be allowed in the classroom?'

From a tech-loving perspective, I vote yes, but after engaging with my peers through the wiki, some interesting points were definitely drawn up about the negatives of incorporating mobiles in the classroom.  

From the knowledge I have gained over the past two weeks, I'm voting that using wikispaces falls under connectivism.  Though I needed to use my cognitive function, the general outlay and from what I have learnt about learning theories, wikispaces seems to embody what connectivism is all about.  I was able to input my two cents and also gain knowledge from my peers.  I would consider myself tech savvy, and in this day and age, being tech savvy is an optimal way to learn.  The internet is full of information and learning how to be information critical is important and the views my peers put forward about the issue showed that we all have a different way of thinking.  It was also a good quality to know that I could obtain a variety of answers from one source!  Connectivism is truly an integral part of being a teacher and a learner in the 21st century.

I'm generally a positive person, who is in touch with their own feelings, so it was somewhat difficult to find answers to the black and blue hats.  I had to really figure out aspects that could be classed as negative or thought provoking.  I came to the realisation that I was probably focusing too hard on trying to find answers that differed from the others in group I posted, that I was losing sight of my own feelings and thought processes.  It's always comforting to know that you can figure out creative responses to certain problems and that people have similar ideas about issues.

I've heard of wikispaces in the past, yet never had an opportunity to use them, but after participating in this activity I have to say I do like wikispaces.  It is a useful tool for compiling a lot of information in one select area to save trawling through multiple websites but along those same lines that's also a draw back.  I can see wikispaces pages becoming hard to read.  With the ranges of fonts and text colours available, I can envision it being a site that becomes messy extremely fast.  I like that the course lecturers have taken the time to section off multiple pages to stop the untidiness occurring.  

As mentioned above in regards to the benefits of wikispaces, it could be an extremely useful ICT within the classroom.  One webpage for the whole class to visit and edit would save a lot of time visiting multiple webpages.  It would also be relatively easy to set up a key, so learning managers can be sure that each student is participating in the space.  I definitely feel like it could be a tool I could incorporate in my future classrooms.

From the first instance of hearing about DeBono's Hats, it's a scaffold I've always liked!  It's such an easy scaffold to connect to and even through its simplicity, it's able to provoke thoughts.  The simplicity of the design means that everybody can understand the language and how they can relate a certain hat to an idea.  I like DeBono's hats and I plan to use it regularly in the future.