Wiki-webs to support Teaching

Wikis have already started making their mark in higher education. Grudzial and colleagues provide a rather long catalog of Wiki uses, in the context of the Coweb project online. This section links to various examples where wikis have been used in teaching - the list was large and we had to limit this section to a very brief summary:-

• student groups used the tool to develop research projects, with the wiki acting as an on-going journal of their work.
• students were required to add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings on a wiki and then discuss using the wiki. The tutor found students were reluctant to edit others work and they had to develop other strategies still within the wiki framework - students uploaded their work, fellow students downloaded these added annotated comments before returning this new version to the wiki; the originator then used this to revise their work.
• used in distance learning where the tutor “posted” things like the syllabus, handouts and students could edit these directly (for all to see) as the session progressed.
• used as a development tool for teachers to provide shared documentation on instructional technology
• used by teaching staff and students to develop their own websites but allowing others to contribute
• there was examples of use in many subject areas from humanities, science and medicine
• commercial packages are available to aid integration and also ease of setting up

DistributedGraduateSeminars “Students will work in groups on their own research project. This will highlight some of the issues surrounding heterogenous data such as the need for metadata. Research project must be on an environmental issue that requires data integration. As part of this project students will create an abstract workflow, subsequent ecological ontologies for concepts needing mediation, and locate relevant data sources for topic. Ideally group data will be integrated and then stored in the metacata server for use by other scientists using morpho. Students will be required to journal on their experiences in working in multidisciplinary teams using wiki page. Instructors will pose a question each week based on the topic area covered during that week to structure the journal/discussion. These wiki pages will be used in round table discussion. Every student is required to participate in a group presentation of there research project. Group presentations will be in the form of a 1 hour presentation.”

link ” For the past 3 years, I have taught a section of our department's symbolic logic course via distance learning. Our specific setup has students at three to six campuses, stationed in front of computers. Each workstation receives an audio- video feed from me, and I can activate any student's camera at any time. One person at a time is in the video window, though when students are there my microphone is also active, so that the class can hear our conversations. Their computers are also configured to share my logic software screen, so that everyone can see the text, examples, and exercises that we are discussing. The situation is quite different from the traditional classroom setting, and it takes several semesters to become accustomed to working with the system. But the distance learning classes are popular at the regional campuses, and the logic class is the only one I would consider teaching via distance learning.”

link “I expanded use of Tiki in two directions. First was an assignment I called WikiNotes. Twice during the semester, each student would take a turn writing a summary and posting it on the wiki. These pages provided a useful guide to the reading, as well as another measure for me of how well the students grasped the readings. Moreover, since the notes were posted on the wiki, the content could be edited by other students. Unfortunately, I did not observe other students correcting errors in the summaries. I know from class discussion that students read each other's notes, but they seemed unwilling to “poach” on other students' work. When I use Tiki again, I will look for ways to make these pages more collaborative. Assigning a pair of students to a particular reading did not achieve this goal, as the students simply divided the pages of the reading and summarized it as two distinct assignments. One idea I have in this regard is to change the nature of the assignment. In other courses, I have assigned what I call “reply papers,” where students select one specific point from the reading. They summarize this point in a paragraph or two, and then they reply to the point from their own perspective in a paragraph or two. They may agree or disagree, or they may simply comment or reflect on the passage. It is possible that this kind of assignment, when given to a pair of students, might generate an interesting page of notes for the readings. The second direction in which I expanded the use of Tiki was for paper assignments. I decided to experiment with collaborative paper assignments. The collaboration took place at the editing, not the writing, stage of the assignment. So students would write their five-to-seven-page papers as usual, but instead of handing them in, they uploaded them to Tiki's file gallery.”

link1, [][http://msed.byu.edu/ipt/west/|link2]] “As a class you will be creating a wikipedia (web resource site) to help teachers learn about different educational technologies that can be used in the classroom. Each group will be required to do 2 wiki pages. Each of your pages can either be a Description Page or an Integration Page about a technology of your choice, preferable one that will be valuable for your specific discipline.”

WikiFish at Auburn University (link is a fine example of how a student-owned site can foster frank communication among its participants. Its stated mission is “to protect the delicate collaborative environment of Design+Construction School culture, and to serve as a protocol and reference guide to keep these balances in check.”18 Students critically examine the school”s methods and its underlying ideologies, often by posing provocative queries such as “If Architecture School were an organized religion, what would our core beliefs be? What would constitute a sin?” or “If you had to “get rid of dead weight” in the curriculum, with which courses would you start?”19 They argue why students at the school should be allowed to pursue their own research agendas, and they debate what constitutes a healthy educational environment. Characteristic of the wiki”s irreverent attitude, the front page announces that those who do not wish to “edit, erase, enhance, beautify, dullify, nullify, derange, arrange, or simply change” the wiki space should “then accept the fact that they will always be complacent, and easily controlled.”20 Then, presumably, they should just go away. More scholarly in approach, the Romantic Audience Project at Bowdoin College (link) is a collaborative study collecting entries focusing on poems, poets, and topics related to Romantic literature. The students chose the wiki framework because “such collaboration, by dynamically and unpredictably highlighting certain terms as representative of communal interest, is of particular interest in a study of Romanticism.”21 The “interesting ways in which the software itself provides order” from apparent disorder, via linking patterns and other contextualizing elements, prompted insight into the process of the research.22 For instance, “posting tendencies emerged that were worthwhile pondering as a class and could be framed as the expression of this group of students. This discussion attracted elaboration; this poem went unlinked; this author attracted biographical elaboration; this entry was cited often by other entries; etc.”23 Perhaps the most common pedagogical application of wikis in education is to support writing instruction. At Teaching Wiki (http://teachingwiki.org), Joe Moxley, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, lists a number of the medium”s strengths for the teaching of writing skills: wikis invigorate writing (“fun” and “wiki” are often associated); wikis provide a low-cost but effective communication and collaboration tool (emphasizing text, not software); wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts; wikis discourage “product oriented writing” while facilitating “writing as a process”; and wikis ease students into writing for public consumption.24

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Example 1, Example 2, Example 3:

Since its own birth in 1994, Serendip has been exploring ways to share information, ideas, and perspectives among diverse populations and in the most interactive ways possible. Through submissions, on-line forums and interactive exhibits, Serendip's web principles have grown out of sharing its own experiences and borrowing from those of others. TWiki Territory is a major new Serendip development along these lines. Previously, most materials on Serendip (and on the web in general) were based on HTML files. TWiki (and other Wiki's) makes possible the creation of web materials which are directly modifiable on the web by web users themselves without having to learn the intricacies of creating and managing HTML files. Now, visitors to Serendip can contribute to its continuing emergence by directly modifying pages and creating new ones in Serendip TWiki Territory. What makes this possible is freeware developed by Twiki.org, whose work elaborated on that of earlier Wiki developers.

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Coweb (Collaborative Web-site) is based on wiki idea. “a simple collaboration tool (such as coweb or Wiki) can allow educators to take ownership of the technology and invent new uses that will be useful in their domain. Though performance and learning improved in the collaborative learning case, student effort (time-on-task) remained the same. Guzdial and Carroll investigated this phenomenon; they found three possible causes for this effect (Guzdial, Carroll, 2002). First, vicarious learning can occur as students view each other s postings and try to understand the issues that their fellow classmates are engaging. Second, posting assignments to a real audience (i.e. fellow learners) provides an opportunity for reflection: students think deeply about the content before they post. Third, the on-line environment can provide support for and an extension of the in-class activities. By discussing the in-class activities in a forum where each student has a better chance of being heard, the average class performance is raised. The on-line environment gives students a clearer understanding of what is expected of them and how the lecture relates to the assignments.” JP

• Morgan's Notebook:. Here Michael Morgan theorized about wikis, blogs, and provides an excellent model of how wikis can be used for reflection.
• Christensen's Wiki:. A read-only Wiki by Mark Christensen, who is a writing teacher at Bemidji State University.
• M. C. Morgan's Classroom Wiki, Bemidji State University:. Junior and Senior level course on blogs and wikis. To write here, you need a password, but browsing is open. Also link. An excellent section of wikis that are likely to interest college students and writing instructors.
• College Writing Online Wiki:. An open Wiki, this space is the precursor to WritingWiki. Still open, it contains links to a variety of instructor and student-based wikis.
• Matt Barton's ClassRoom:Wiki, University of Tampa:. First-year composition courses at UT, using “taviwiki”&a variation on the open wiki..
• Grammar WikiAn introduction to grammar for college students, using sushi wiki…
• TeachingWiki: A space for college-level writing instructors to brainstorm.
• Eric Mason's Wiki Dialog Project: Mason's assignment and students' drafts.

• World Wide Wikis > One Big Wiki:. Extensive list of wikis, annotated by MarkDilley: and RalfLehmann. Outside of composition studies, this list provides a good view of how wikis are being used in business and industry, particularly high tech cultures.
• Swiki Swiki by Georgia Tech. Technically, this is a swiki swiki as opposed to a wiki wiki. Built on the wiki wiki code created by Ward Cunningham, this collaboration tool is being used and developed at Georgia Tech to facilitate colloboration in educational contexts.
• Drexel U (US): full lecture screencasts, podcasts & pdfs http://chem241.wikispaces.com/chem241.wikispaces.com Organic Chemistry - introductory course, correlation of molecular properties with physical properties of materials covering detailed mechanisms of several reactions: aromatic compounds, ketones & aldehydes, amines, carboxylic acids & derivatives, enols & enolate ions. Syllabus, FAQ, (class blog archived lectures, class assignments), tutorials, class workshops.