Sticky Wiki

I like the idea of trying a wiki to allow my Psy 101 students to collaborate on a project in small groups that highlights differences in personality typing. Although I often have students of diverse ages in my courses, even among traditional college-age students, most have experienced at least one “workplace challenge” with a boss or coworker. Often that quintessential difficult person is a colleague with a personality type that opposes the student’s type, or at the very least, is someone who exhibits personality traits that are “annoying” or otherwise push the student’s buttons.

The intention of this activity is to heighten students’ awareness that these differences are not “wrong” or “abnormal” (well, let’s just stick to that theme for now ;-) They’re just different. And if they understood where that “difficult person” was coming from, his or her perspective, prevalent attitudes and behaviors, my students might not get “triggered” so easily.

So… in this activity, students will take a mini-version of the Colors Personality Inventory to deduce their dominant color (or personality) type. They will then jointly create a wiki page in class to address the following:

1. Describe five attitudes and/or behaviors that you value in coworkers.

2. Identify and explain five attitudes and/or behaviors that cause you stress and/or frustration in a work setting.

3. Develop five strategies FOR OTHERS WHO ARE UNLIKE YOU to more effectively work and play well with “your kind”…

My expectation for my students would be to collaborate on the wiki n class. (If need be, we might relocate class to a classroom with individual computers or the computer lab.) My thought is to start in a controlled environment so that I can “force participation” ;-) If it works well, I might expand the wiki collaborative effort to another group project…

Here’s a link to my wiki… http://colors-at-work.wikispaces.com/

(Hopefully I have the settings set correctly so that you can actually look at it ;-))