Wikis in Education
When trying to find things for work and to try and help other people I often come across some really good articles or web pages. In this instance I was trying to find something to help me demonstrate to a reluctant user that a Wiki can be used effectively for an item of coursework, and still be assessed.
I found this:
What I pulled out of this resource for the academic were the following passages (pages 10-14), intended to outline the advantages of a ‘wiki in education’ for someone new to the idea/technology.
(The emphasised text is my emphasis, not from the original piece)
“The strength of a wiki is the ability for numerous interested readers and users to express ideas online, edit someone else’s work, send and receive ideas, and post links to related resources and sites. As a result, wikis go a step further and allow for greater collaboration and interactivity. Wikis have been found to have value for educational purposes, and their use has begun to be integrated into a number of university courses, in particular.”
“Wikis are useful for education in that they help to promote student participation and also a sense of group community and purpose in learning. Indeed, an important element of this is the relaxed sense of control over the content, allowing students to have a greater role in managing its focus and direction.”
“The (educational) emphasis therefore is on teamwork, continuous review and testing, and the development of conversational sharing. Inherent in the workings of wikis is support for an open, collaborative environment, where many people can contribute to the development of knowledge instead of being limited to a set of “experts.” It appears that conversational knowledge acquisition and management are appropriate for wikis. As for educational applications and KM, a study … examined the use of a wiki to help encourage and support collaborative activities in a knowledge management course. More specifically, using wikis in the course helped to encourage openness and better sharing and updating of knowledge bases. Many-to-many communication is supported, and the persistence of the created pages formed the basis of a knowledge repository. In short, the impact of easy page creation and improved updating and editing, together with effective maintenance of knowledge histories, were seen as positives.”
