A Wiki, Vygotsky, PMIs and Shared Learning

Today we learnt about the value of an Expert Jigsaw- this is where different members of a group contribute their understanding and knowledge to a shared topic. The topic was Learning Theories and we all know there is a mountain of information out there in relation to this topic. For one person to sift through and make sense of the data would be a mammoth task, but as a group we were each assigned one theory or theorist to delve into then we needed to post our findings into the class Wiki.
My partner and I were assigned Vygotsky. who in my opinion, was a Russian theorist who was thinking "outside the box" well before the so called "box" was invented. 
Together Monique and I researched Vygotsky's learning theories and then we decided to focus our individual attention on three each (due to time restraints). I focused on Vygotsky's theories of Value, Knowledge and Society.
This is where the PMIs came into effect. PMIs (Plus, Minus, Interesting) get the learner to think about the topic in more depth.  It is easy to have strong positive or negative opinions on a topic but to have to consider what is good as well as what is bad helps develop higher order thinking. It is the critical thinking skills developed when we consider a topic more broadly than our our opinions.
Once we each contributed to the group wiki we were able to not only consider our own findings but we were able to read and comment on the findings our our peers who had explored other learning theories. This is where the expert jigsaw comes into play - we were each the expert on our individual segment and the pieces of information we discovered then fitted into the bigger picture (jigsaw) that was Learning Theories.
It is easy to see how this tool would be beneficial in a classroom content. Students could focus on one part of the topic which would enable them to delve deeper into it than if they had to explore the entire topic themselves. Shared learning also enables the learners to learn when they are teaching their segment to others.