Abstract:

Over a period of four years, the author has collected student assignments and reports from colleagues through an online wiki tool. A wiki is, according to dictionary.com, “a website that allows anyone to add, delete or revise content by using a web browser”. In this study, I have used the tool Confluence, which our university use.

The study consists of two parts. First, master students of mathematics education have been given an assignment of analysing a digital tool for the learning of mathematics. I have collected 54 of these analyses, available in an online format on the Confluence Wiki called “DigiMat”. Second, our institute, Institute for teacher education, have a professional development program (named Diggilu), which also has a similar assignment for the staff at the teacher education institute. Their assignment was to make a presentation of how they use a chosen digital tool in teacher education classes. Around twenty of these have been collected (although these are not at the time of writing, publicly available). I have been given permissions to use a number of these analyses freely.

The master students in the first part were given the following four part assignment, more or less unchanged through the course of four years (translated from Norwegian):
1. Write an analysis of a digital tool for the learning of mathematics. You are encouraged to use multimodal elements like video, hyperlinks and screen shots. Describe opportunities and limitations. Describe the nature and philosophy of the tool, and the kind of teaching or learning philosophy it represents. How is this a tool that can help students reach learning goals?
2. Edit an already written web page. Write down what alterations you do. This could be things you are disagreeing with, things you mean have changed since the time of writing or similar.
3. Comment on two other presentations. That is, make comments in the commentary field at the bottom of two pages. This could be your experiences with the tool or similar.
4. Present your analysis in class. Show demos, screen shots etc, and do a walkthrough of the page you have made in the wiki.

Later, this task was re-formulated in order to include staff at the university. The focus was duly changed, and the staff at the Institute for teacher education got the task of presenting a way they have used technology in their teaching at the Institute. The possibilities for use of multimodality were similar as for the master students.

In this paper I will show some examples of what some of the master students and staff presented in the web pages they made. I will analyse the web pages constructed by teacher education staff and master students and compare tensions and discussions to be found, as well as similarities and differences.

For instance, there appears to be differences in how the colleagues addressed each other compared to the master students. It is also apparent that there are several discussions taking place in the creation of these web pages in the wikies. As an administrator, one can access the change log of the pages, thus revealing how people have altered others’ pages. That is to say, there is a discussion going on BEHIND the web pages. A different discussion is going on ON the web pages, namely in the commentary fields. One last discussion, is the one who takes place OFF the web pages, that is, the lunch break talk between colleagues, or the free time talk between students.

Keywords:

Technology, mathematics education, teacher education, wikimedia.