Blog

The organizing team wants to thank all participants in the wiki workshop for their commitment and valuable input! We will make summaries, suggest continued activities and publish a series of pictures as soon as we are back at work after our summer holidays. Check this wiki around August 10.

Best wishes from the organizing team.

The Nordic ISCAR is a community event with participants within and outside of Scandinavia.

This time the event was located in the countryside outside of Oslo. The first picture show me (Ingvill) together with a Swedish colleague preparing for a session on emerging classroom practices. In the other picture, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic colleagues are having a fruitful conversation.

The Fourth Nordic Conference on Cultural and Activity Research took place June 15-17 and was hosted by InterMedia, University of Oslo

The focus of this conference is to develop multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical research on societal, cultural and historical dimensions of human practices. The conference program mirrored this broad intention with presentations from education, work and informal learning as well as theoretical and methodological contributions. However, only two presentations related to Wiki reseach.

Svein Olav Norenes and Trond Eiliv Hauge from InterMedia University of Oslo talked about a study of students engaged in collective mathematics discourse practices on a Wiki. This presentation focused on how the students formulate and share thoughts and explanations. One interesting finding is that the Wiki became an "extra" activity, as the students worked collaboratively and solved problems using text writing as a tool in the construction of mathematical meaning.

Three of this workshops organisers, Andreas Lund, Ole Smørdal and Ingvill Rasmussen, talked about design ideas and classroom realities. Drawing on the experience from two earlier interventions with wikis, we presented an intervention in which we focused on the relation between the task an how the pupils worked in a wiki environment. For this we have adopted and adapted the Xwiki <http://www.xwiki.org/> application. Our intervention draw on participatory design in the sense that the teacher is brought into the development of the technology.

Also, Sami Paavola who are taking part in this workshop presented at the ISCAR2007 conference. His presentation was titled: 'Object of Inquiry within Trialogical Approach to Learning'. As Sami has written in his presentation here- he is interested in 'new learning theories'. The trialogic approach to learning is, in my interpretation, an attempt to understand better the mediated nature of human activity and it concentrates particularlty on understanding how people over time organise themselves to develop shared objects.

Added by Ingvill Rasmussen

Hello, we have launched the wiki for the pre-conference event today. We opted for confluence, which is used for our intranet. XWiki is still our development platform, and we use it as a framework for developing wikis.