How to use a wiki to facilitate learning



You've started blogging and occasionally podcasting, but you're still requiring students to waste trees to hand in their homework? Encourage collaboration in the classroom with a Wiki!

Join the 21st Century
Watch the video entitled Wikis in Education.



Wikis in Education Sources

Ways to Use Wikis in Education

 * Easily create simple Web sites. Anyone can do it...really.
 * Project development with peer review. Everyone has written a paper and reread it so many times that they couldn't see a glaring error right in front of their face and your friend points it right out.  Multiply that by a million, and you get a big improvement.
 * Group authoring. Tired of emailing word processor files back and forth and trying to figure out who has the latest copy?  Leave it in one place where your changes are instantly seen by everyone.
 * Track a group project. Can't meet in person because of conflicting schedules?  Post your discussions on your group wiki.  You do meet together but you forget what everyone promised to do after the meeting?  Have a scribe enter action items right into the wiki during the meeting.
 * Data collection. Make the computer do the work for you.
 * Review classes and teachers. Publish your experience in a class so other students can make a better decision about whether to take that class.
 * Collaborative curriculum design/course content authoring. Anything that requires collaboration can be done through a wiki.

This video provides some helpful ways to use wiki's in the classroom

Pedagogical Potential
Wikis...
 * maximize interplay
 * are democratic
 * work in real time
 * are text-based
 * permit public document construction or distributed authorship
 * promote negotiation
 * permit collaborative document editing
 * work on volunteer collaboration

Problem Potential
Wikis...
 * complicate the instructor evaluation of individual student writing, although you can view contributions made by logged-in users.
 * are prone to vandalism. When spam or other garbage is posted, it's easy enough to restore back to a previous version, but it does require some work.
 * can enable anonymity, which may not be desired in your setting. You can always require contributors to be logged in to post.
 * provide public feedback. If someone enters bad data, they will be corrected in front of their peers.  Some may find this intimidating.
 * require trust. You really just have to let go let community creativity run wild.  Problems will correct themselves.
 * can disseminate faulty knowledge which is potentially dangerous

Wiki Culture

 * Cite your sources. Link right to an authoritative source that backs you up.
 * Be polite. Wikis are tools to allow us to work better together, so don't get mad when someone uses it, even though they don't have great grammar.  Just fix it.
 * Don't use copyrighted material without permission. Provide external links to copyrighted materials and take advantage of fair use when you can, but don't steal copyrighted material.
 * Maintain a Neutral Point of View (NPOV). Present information straight forward using language that would make it difficult to tell who wrote it - neutral.

Example Wiki Pages

 * k12 wiki conference
 * Student Data Storage - Needs and Methods
 * High School Online Collaborative Writing
 * Review of courses taught at Brown University
 * Westwood Schools

Return to the Main Page Using Blogs and Wikis in Education.