Silver and gold

Today my wife and I celebrate our silver wedding anniversary. Those 25 years have flashed by, and like most couples we have had our ups and downs, but I wouldn't change any of it. Our marriage has been the golden age in my life. I want to thank Dawn for all her support, love and commitment to me over those years. She has given me three beautiful children, and has always been by my side through good times and bad.

A few people already know this story, but it will probably be new to most: I first met Dawn Kendal on an Autumn morning in 1985 outside my Father's house, on what was supposed to have been her wedding day to another man! Dawn had decided to call off her wedding (in Newcastle, 400 miles away), she had travelled down to stay with relatives and here we were talking together in my Dad's garden in the Plymouth sunshine. Ultimately she decided to stay in Plymouth, and the rest is history. You just can't make that kind of story up, can you?

We quickly realised we had plenty in common (even little quirks like both being right handed, but both swapping knives and forks to eat left handed) and we were married on October 4, 1986. I have never been in trouble for forgetting the date of our anniversary - it was a very memorable day, particularly when Dawn was over 20 minutes late arriving at the church and I wondered for a brief moment whether she had bailed out from a wedding for the second time.... It is also easy to remember because October 4th is the date of the launch of the first ever artificial satellite - Sputnik - which heralded the space race, and also a new era in telecommunications.

Dawn originally trained as a nurse, but then after our children came along, she took a few years out and then retrained as a teacher, gaining a first class BA honours degree in English Language and ICT from Exeter University, and her PGCE Secondary Education from Plymouth University. After various teaching jobs including two years working within my own university department as an associate lecturer (where we did some research on social media together) she is now a teacher in one of the most technically advanced schools in the UK - Saltash.net. She works alongside people such as Dan Roberts (@chickensaltash), is key stage 3 co-ordinator and is a very popular and innovative educator. I am of course, extremely proud of her. She is @dawnywheeler on Twitter by the way...

So thank you Dawn for our first 25 years together. Thank you for believing in me and sticking by me. Now, is it too much to ask if you and I can go for the 50? ;-)


Silver and gold by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning with wikis

Today I sent back the corrected proofs for a new article due to be published next month in the journal Learning, Media and Technology. I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but LMT must be one of the most attractive journal covers I've seen. It's also a quality publication, so I'm delighted the article has been accepted. I co-authored it last year with my wife Dawn, who was working with me as an associate lecturer in Education at the University of Plymouth. She is now back in the secondary sector teaching English at Saltash.net Community School, but this is a nice reminder for us both of the research we did together looking at how wikis can be used to promote quality academic writing. The article is titled 'Using wikis to promote quality learning in teacher training' and the reference is below. I'm posting this here because some of my Twitter friends told me they wanted a heads up on the article before it's published. Here is is, and I hope it is useful...

This paper discusses writing as a social practice and speculates on how wikis might be used to promote higher quality academic writing and support collaborative learning. This study of undergraduate teacher trainees' online learning activities focuses on how shared spaces – wikis – might be used to communicate ideas and generate course specific content. The study also explored how students, through such activities, were able to improve their academic writing skills and engage more critically in learning. Data captured from student discussion boards and a post-module e-mail questionnaire (n=35) were used to map student perceptions of the usefulness of wikis in support of their academic studies. The data indicate that most students raised their skill level in writing directly to the publicly viewable wiki space, in sharp contrast to the more informal content they posted on the discussion boards. The scope of collaborative writing was limited due to students' reluctance to edit each others' work, but students appreciated the shared environment as a means of discussing their work and the content of the course. Students reported that their academic writing skills had improved through their formal participation in the wiki.

Wheeler, S. and Wheeler, D. (2009) Using wikis to promote quality learning outcomes in teacher training. Learning, Media and Technology, 34 (1), 1-10.