This area introduces ways you could use Wikis in your teaching, considerations you need to think about when using them and pointers on where to look for more information.
Wikis (from the Hawaiian for ‘quick’) are web pages that can be added to and edited simply and easily. Editing takes place directly on the page using a visual editor. You can embed links, images and media of all types and build simple or very large websites. A number of companies host Wikis free of charge or alternatively you can download and host a Wiki on your own server.
The pages created for a Wiki can be made public or private and you can set controls on what users can and can’t do e.g. create pages or not, modify content or not etc. In this way you can manage and control the development of a wiki.
If you’ve ever wanted to change, add or edit a page you’ve been reading on the internet then you’ll understand the potential power of Wikis for use in education. They are extremely easy to build and therefore are useful when you want to get content onto the web quickly and simply. You can add pages for different topics, people, tasks etc then add text, links and upload media.
Wikis are also great as a personal space for individuals to reflect or author and structure their own material they can also be used when you want groups of students to work collaboratively on creating a web resource or any other document. Students can redraft each other’s text and it can be shared among a community of readers. If activities are designed well they can encourage participation and construction of new knowledge when students are not in the same location. They can, therefore, play an important part in formative and summative assessment.
Content developed in the wiki can also become a valuable source of knowledge passed down from one cohort to the next like an online glossary or encyclopaedia.
Some wikis even enable you to create a kind of ‘social space’ adding a commenting option while others act as a library or resource bank using attachments..create new pages add links etc
Wikis allow for greater parity within the learning community[1] (Walton & Carr). Knowledge is negotiated through the authoring process and unlike blogs and forums there is no set linear pathway through the content it can be arranged, as with other HTML pages, on one or as many pages as is required.
There is no reason per se not to take advantage of the technologies that the rest of the world is using for communications. They move and develop much more quickly than organizationally provided systems typically can, and often do completely different things. The choice of tool you use to meet you and your students’ learning objectives is your choice. Some practical considerations are outlined below.
Classroom practice
A lecturer in International Management with a large cohort of PG students divided the large group into smaller groups of 7-8 to work on an international strategy project. The students used the Wiki for collaborative writing. The task formed 30% of the overall assessment (75% for the product of the group work – a 1,500 word exec summary and 25% for the group activity on the wiki).
A computing lecturer working with postgraduate students studying ‘Requirements Engineering’ introduced Wiki tasks to provide students with opportunities for group collaboration and transferable skills for industry (how do you remove conflicts and ambiguity from a set of requirements?). Three assignments were used, the first introduced students to the wiki, its purpose and editing facilities. Subsequently, students took on stakeholder roles, collaborating with other students to produce an agreed requirements specification.
A lecturer in English wanted their students to create a modern edition of 18th Century poems. The students were divided into groups of 4. Their edition (including such things as biographies, annotations and a glossary) could be no more than 4000 words and would be developed in a Wiki. A reflective log examining the methods and practices employed formed 40% of the module grade.
A lecturer in the business school used a module Wiki with postgraduate students. After each lecture the tutor published a ‘weekly’ task. These included adding literature overviews, adding definitions to a module glossary, developing coursework or providing feedback to peers etc .The students then had the week to present their contributions. Just before the lecture the following week the contributions are reviewed and feedback provided to the group. This can be used to re-shape the lecture.
A Law lecturer set a Wiki task in an undergraduate legal writing module groups were set the task of writing a judgement from a case study they had read.