Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Justin Logan
Scenario
The scene for this paper is going to be in an undergraduate college classroom for athletic
training students. The problem being faced is with the advancement of distance learning and e-
colleges, athletic training programs are being forced to allow, to an extent, some online courses
for ease. For example, most of the Doctorate in Athletic Training (DAT) courses or graduate
level Masters degree (MS), as opposed to entry level Masters, are doing online programs with
only a week or two of face to face at the end of the semester for validation and assessment. Also,
with athletic trainers needing to work as a member of a team, they need to be able to work as a
part of a group. This is where the Web 2.0 Collaboration Tool comes into play. This allows these
programs to assign group projects while being able to monitor the amount of group work that
happens.
Coursework
patient. There will be a variety of injuries, settings, and ages for the students to work with and
through setbacks along the way given by the instructor at different times. The group needs to
work together to create a cohesive rehabilitation program, from when they enter the athletic
training facility to when they are fully cleared with no more injury, with videos, pictures, and
written explanations for each exercise and conquer each setback as they come. One of these
will be a high school football player with a college scholarship riding on him returning to play.
The final issue is going to be an elderly woman that is trying to recover from a total hip
replacement surgery. Athletic training sees a variety of patients in different settings and must be
WIKISPACES 3
prepared to see different injuries with varying degrees of motivation, compliance, pain tolerance,
Obstacle
This is a project that needs to be done over Spring break. Since many students do not live
near their higher education institution, the problem must be done over the internet and
WikiSpaces
specific groups. On the part of the teacher, they need to email an invitation code for the class to
each student and have them join in on their personal log in, then assign the group members to
their own team. From there, the students can work together in their group and all the teacher
One of the best features of this collaboration tool is that students can create their own
discussion boards for their own problems and discuss their participation and spread out
responsibility how they see fit. This is what makes WikiSpaces a Collaboration tool first and a
Communication tool second. One of the negative features of WikiSpaces is that it is does take a
bit of time to truly master the website. There are many different avenues to take and many
options to truly create a very individual and specific online classroom, and it takes a bit of
Skills Required
The skills required for the use of WikiSpaces is the ability to organize and delegate. As
mentioned previously, this is a very complicated website to get used to but once a small to
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moderate amount of use has been put into it, the WikiSpace can become exactly what the teacher
needs and wants. The environment can be strictly controlled to decrease the amount of clutter
Resources
The only resources needed to use WikiSpaces is a computer, the internet, and some time
to execute the project and create the ideal classroom. If the classroom is being used for education
small group, there is a fee and cost to use the website depending on how much space is wanted
for storage; 2 GB is $100 a year, 5GB is $400 a year, and 1000GB starts at $2000 a year. The
last one is meant more for medium to large business with a minimum of 100 users working on an
Implementation
The first thing that must be done is that the teacher must set up the classroom in
WikiSpaces and invite the students to the class. The next thing is to assign the students to their
specific groups with their individual projects. Assigning the teams to one of the three scenarios
mentioned above, high school athlete, construction worker, or elderly post-surgical patient, must
have their own demographic and medical history developed and given to the students. From here,
the instructions must be given to work as a team and develop their own rehab program how they
see fit. The instructor can interrupt the progress of the patient with a setback in rehabilitation to
further simulate a realistic scenario. This can be done with a broad message to all students, or as
a discussion board entry in each individual teams page to individualize the project. The students
will be given the week of Spring break to work on this project and the projects will be discussed
in class upon return to campus. Creative freedom is the idea of this project to allow the students
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to use their imagination and challenge them intellectually while introducing them to a new web
Follow up
WikiSpaces was successfully implemented in the project. The students had a difficult
time navigating the site in the beginning as anticipated but became more comfortable using it
toward the second and third day the project was open. Student engagement was improved
because they could control the speed of the project to their needs and the inherent creativity
needed for the program was fostered by the way WikiSpaces works, by allowing the students to
truly be creative. The students could bounce ideas off each other in the discussion board and
provide criticism, mostly positive, and really feed off each other with ideas for their individual
portions.
Recommendation
I would indeed recommend WikiSpaces to others. It allows for almost complete creative
freedom, the ability to communicate with people in a controlled place, and allows the
teacher/trainer/manager to monitor the progress and the discussions in one spot with ease. The
users can effectively communicate and work on different parts of the same project with ease in a
specific place and keep the rest of their needs separate. The disadvantage that I would identify
with WikiSpaces is that it takes a bit of getting used to, to effectively use it to its full potential.
With all that being said, I would give it an 8/10 because you get the communication tool inside
of the collaboration tool and creates an ideal location to focus on the task and reduce potential
distractors. I absolutely plan on using WikiSpaces in the future, maybe in the same manner as I
Reference