Wikis in Education
The Internet of Web 2.0 is all about collaborative and dynamic content, and this has had a huge impact in education and eLearning. I want to concentrate on just one ‘tool’, that of the ‘wiki’.
In a nutshell, a wiki is “a type of website that allows the visitors to add, remove, and sometimes edit the available content” or a website that “includes the collaboration of work from many different authors”. Whether it’s limited access or global, the wiki can be used for many different purposes … information, documentation, assessment, etc.
According to Stewart Malder 38% of the responders to his poll are using a wiki as a knowledge base or source for documentation, with a further 17% as a tool for project management. However, this does not cover the education environment as the options offered are base more in ‘business’ than ‘academia’. The beauty of a wiki, as Arielle Pandolph writes, is that they are “flexible, easy to use, and don’t have a steep learning curve like a lot of technology tools”.
Benefits of using a wiki are undoubtedly that the wiki is fast, efficient collaboration giving the ability to collaboratively build projects, papers, and websites, and as a tool for gathering input “in an inclusive way”. Students like them because they make group projects easier to coordinate, teachers like them because they can interact with students throughout the course of a project or assignment, see their progress, and give them feedback along the way.
Wikis are commonly being used in higher education for (according to Arielle) group authoring, project development, peer review. We almost must identify the advantage of the wiki as a source of reducing email traffic for collaborative work.
If you want more information on a wiki, try Google. If you want more information on how to use them/it, stay tuned (subscribe to the RSS feed) and I’ll write about it again later.
I wanted to share an online collaborative project that I have been working on for a PBS class. I have just implemented the project with a sample group of students, and they loved it! I really cannot say enough positive things so far about using wikis.
The project was designed to be implemented with my two ninth grade study skills classes. The classes are taught to students who need to learn basic study, memorization, and organization skills. For the project, students are divided into pairs. They read and watch the study skills memory tips given on the website http://www.studygs.net/memory/. This website gives a list of seven mnemonics. Each of the groups works on a different mnemonic or technique. They then post information about their trick and their own original examples of their memory technique, using their English vocabulary words, on the wiki page created for this purpose. Each group then goes on the pages of the other groups in both classes to read and learn the examples of others and comment giving their own examples. The goals of this project are that students learn to use memorization techniques to study, students learn to use technology skills to learn concepts and collaborate online and that students will learn to collaborate with other learners.
The wiki gives the students a forum to express uniquely their learning of the techniques and enhances collaboration skills. The commenting/blogging gives the students a forum to express what they have learned from other students and enhances communication skills. My sample group seemed to enjoy a new way of learning and taking notes. They particularly liked being able to add their own images and personal touches. My hope is that my study skills classes will react similarly. In addition, I feel that another change that will occur is that I will seek to use this method to replace some of the other traditional ways that I was teaching concepts. For example, I previously had the students sit in groups to take notes on their assigned physics readings. I will most likely now replace that activity with students using wikis in groups to post notes on their physics readings. I will be actively seeking new ways to teach the same concepts.