# PedaGlue

PedaGlue Progress Paper

## Abstract

Problem: This paper focuses on using the community to provide purpose, mature feedback, and using collaboration as tools in constructing knowledge. ... , Approach:..., Findings:..., and Conclusions:... (100 words). Paper max. 5,000 words.

## What is PedaGlue?

A basic review of constructivism in the fields of learning theory appears in Wikipedia (2007). At ITHET (2004) Kennedy presented his constructivism approach named 'PedaGlue'. He taught a class how to provide pedagogical links themselves, a technique he called the Teaching of PedaGlue. Systematically and intentionally he teaches post-graduate students how to do this didactisizing (pedagogical process) themselves, and thereby rapidly develop new, modern, dynamic instructional reference material. "To ensure that life-long learning takes place, we need to empower the students to make the links themselves, thereby cancelling their dependence on their sources. Otherwise, we are sentencing them to be eternal consumers of knowledge. To achieve empowerment, we need to teach the glue to students and guarantee the next generation of lecturers and researchers. More immediately, we need to help our students to become life-long learners through teaching them how to provide their own pedagogical links, which we call Teaching PedaGlue." (Kennedy 2004)
"The didacticizing processes include:
* giving the prerequisites,
* giving a summary of what is to come,
* giving the background,
* giving the viewpoints,
* giving the limitations,
* giving the content,
* giving examples which are relevant,
* giving the links to reference material,
* giving exercises to hammer home the material and enable the students to internalise it,
* giving links to supplementary material to fully engage the minds of bright students,
* assessing the students to quantify the degree of assimilation of the material. " (Kennedy, 2006)
The value of higher education resides in generic skills and attitudes rather than specific knowledge acquired — these include skills such as how to access, process, create, share and apply specific knowledge, and internalize attitudes such as critical awareness and intellectual curiosity (Marshall 1996).

## How can post-graduates get international peer review and learn to work together?

There have been three subsequent years of teaching the course where students have added to the scholarly body of knowledge via the class activities. These have not been reported upon before and are now reported here.

## Approach

This paper reports on how the students have been exposed to critical peer review; how this has been motivating (and revealing), and how working together was forced upon the students. The paper reports on the final two phases of the instructional development cycle: 10. Make a Reference work. 11. Manage and maintain it. In these years, the students have contributed to the popular site Wikipedia (Kennedy et al., 2005), or the textbook site IEEE Connexions (http://cnx.org/). They learnt to collaborate with each other (and a critical world) in producing an on-line encyclopaedic entry / textbook on a set topic.
The teaching technique has been used in the Teletraffic Engineering course taught face-to-face at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The broad aims of the course are to teach the student:
* the basic probability theory underlying teletraffic.
* how to design and specify circuit quantities for voice, based on traffic measurements and an acceptable Grade of Service.
* how to predict, quantify, evaluate and reduce congestion in voice networks.
During these three years the post-graduate teletraffic engineering course further used a stronger constructivist approach. Group work and Problem Based Learning is expected. The lecturer's constructivist approach is documented in his paper on Pedaglue. (Although it might seem that this gives the lecturer a lighter load, this is in fact not the case.)
Two changes to search engines have occurred after publication of the paper and need to be documented. Although still advertised, link: no longer works on AltaVista. Secondly, Google has introduced http://scholar.google.com, which almost avoids the need to type "Abstract" etc. in the search string. Nevertheless, this is still a good trick for hunting down papers that are indexed by Google, but not Scholar.

### How can students get immediate international peer review?

After lecturing "the dry textbook", the 2005 course was then also run on a constructivist basis. The eight students in the class had to put entries onto Wikipedia under the heading "Teletraffic Engineering" (Wikipedia 2007).

### How can students learn to work together?

After lecturing "the dry textbook", the 2006 course was then also run on a constructivist basis. The eight students in the class had to put together The Teletraffic Textbook, in IEEE Connexions sponsored initially at Rice University (http://cnx.org). This taught them how to work co-operatively with the scholars that had gone before them and with their colleagues in the class, which constituted the only peer review prior to marking.
To get them thinking along the right lines, students were asked what makes the difference between an encyclopedia and a textbook. They soon realized that the textbook has examples and exercises, which the encyclopedia lacks. They were then directed to the encyclopedic information about teletraffic previously placed on the Web by the class of 2005, and requested to investigate other sources.
Students were then given three assignments of increasing difficulty, which they had to submit to IEEE Connexions and also to submit to the lecturer by e-mail as an HTML attachment:
1. The first assignment for 15 marks was to generate a first pass writing of Chapter 1, the chapter which summarizes the prerequisite knowledge that incoming students (like them) are expected (rightly or wrongly) to have absorbed, before being let loose on the true teletraffic material. This entailed a certain degree of reflection, and introspection and critical thinking.
2. The second assignment for 45 marks was for each student to write half of chapters 3-5 of The Teletraffic Textbook (TTT). This required referencing multiple sources and merging the findings intelligently. The students added value by adding in Examples and Exercises (with linked answers).
3. The third assignment for 40 marks was to rewrite part of the Chapter 1 contribution that a different student had previously written in assignment 1. This also taught them to be critical thinkers.
The students were briefed beforehand on the conventions to be used e.g., every page was to be headed with a title question that was answered in the module. See appendix 1. In-house formatting conventions were also conveyed to the students. The students themselves had to work out how IEEE connexions worked. No instruction was given here as there was no time was available for this in the course.

## Did learning occur?

Learning did occur. The average mark for assignment 1 was 66% and assignment 3 was 73%. As the material being examined was the same, the positive difference indicates that Chapter One was improved through subsequent editing by other students.
The resulting Teletraffic Textbook (TTT) is divided into 5 'courses' (really chapters), each composed of learning objects called 'modules' (really web pages).
Students admitted to doing much more than twice the nominal number of hours required for the course. The 60 modules they created are listed in Appendix 1. in alphabetical order of all the chapters and modules (really files) that they created.

## Future work

In 2007, assignments were to:
1. read and improve a chapter in The Teletraffic Textbook (TTT)
2. add a chapter to TTT.
3. edit and improve someone else's recently added chapter in TTT.
Chapters for TTT at the end of 2006 deal with the topics, listed here in Appendix 2 in alphabetical order, but not in logical order of presentation. The 18 bold topics are missing. The students' task for a subsequent year is to rectify this.
In the future, the students could be asked to contribute to Wikibooks.