ICT in Higher Education: Wiki-based Reflection to Promote Deeper Thinking Levels

Published Online April 2017 in MECS DOI: 10.5815/ijmecs.2017.04.05

Class presentation is a popular activity in higher education where students can be actively involved in the follow-up question/answer (Q/A) session. Traditionally, the question pattern in higher education uses common verbs like describe, list, define, or state something based on a specific topic, where they do not need to engage their thinking, except memorize the knowledge and echo (recall) the same knowledge, i.e., involve lower order thinking (LOT, Bloom’s Taxonomy). In some cases, they have been asked to explain or calculate something where they need to rationalize their thinking with the knowledge. The purpose of higher education is to produce skilled graduates, who could become real world problem solvers, critical thinkers or have the ability of think critically. Hence, to accomplish this purpose higher education institutes need to encourage students to reflect on their own thinking. In this regard, classroom group presentations that require a solution to a real problem would be helpful to engage students and promote active learning.

A key element of classroom or face-to-face learning is the social and communicative interactions between student and teacher, and student and student. The fundamental learning activities of a student is to ask a question, to share an opinion, or to disagree with a point of view, which are usually carried out through conversation, discussion, and debate among students and/or between teachers and students. Eventually, a learning objective is achieved by performing these face-to-face classroom learning activities. Thus, online learning requires amendments by teachers as well as students for successful interactions to occur towards reflective learning. Generally online education/learning substitutes classroom face-to-face interaction with discussion boards, blogs, wiki, synchronous chat, electronic bulletin boards, and e-mails. Some scholars suggest that interaction in an online learning environment promotes student-centered learning, encourages wider student participation, and produces more in-depth and reasoned discussions than a conventional face-to-face classroom setting does [12, 25]. Learning or acquisition of knowledge and thinking are interrelated lifelong processes [5]. So, one must learn how to refine and adjust one’s thinking and reflects his or her own thinking beyond the knowledge to add depth and substance to his or her own knowledge. By continuous practice with time, one can get higher at making more thoughtful observations and judgments and can apprehend how values are reflected in thinking and behaving [29]. Thus, if it is possible to nurture the learning and thinking processes, it will continue for a lifetime.

In addition, online involvement rates in education (a form of blended learning) are growing at much faster rates than the traditional classroom or face-to-face learning; specifically, in higher education in all over the world. Hence, the research question of this paper is outlined as “Is it possible to promote thinking levels using ICT tools?”, that means, can additional questions on class work or class presentations given in a web based ICT tool scaffold to help students move into higher levels of thinking? To address this issue, wiki is chosen as an ICT tool for higher education where students participate virtually to post their Q/A based on a poster presentation. Finally, to outline the findings of this research work, the popular Lee’s Model [13] of thinking levels is used to analyze the student’s data set collected from the wikibased poster presentations.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: in section 2, related works have been stated. Section 3 describes the research methodology applied in this paper. Section 4 illustrates the findings of this research work by analyzing the results from the experiment. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.

• II.    Related Works

Philosophy of learning based on reflection begins from everyday experience at a higher education institution. Reflection of thinking can help students to strengthen learning and professional efficiency which eventually helps them to think beyond the knowledge. Hence, reflection of thinking activates learning, self-analysis, as well as solution of real world problems. So, the learning in higher education needs to emphasize on this goal, i.e. to produce critical thinker.