Week 5: Wikis for Formal Learning

[Michele Martin]

Here we'll discuss how to use a wiki for learning in classroom and online settings with students.

[Matthew Bibby]

I am very interested in the concept of using Wikis in both eLearning & business environments. I have been researching for a while but haven't yet started one. I have TiddlyWiki (sitting empty) on my desktop and an urge to set up a WikiSpace or maybe even a wiki at Google Sites.

From a business perspective, I see it as being a wonderful place to document procedures and processes. This is usually information that becomes outdated quite quickly, but if it was so easy for anyone to update then this level of accessibility would act as a good motivator. Depending on who had access some sort of moderation procedure may need to be put in place.

I have also thought a lot about how Wiki's could be used in eLearning and while I am still forming my thoughts on this I can see great potential.

[Melanie Jennings]

I have been most successful in using wikis in the K12 environment. As I noted in another discussion, the teachers in my professional development sessions/courses feel uncomfortable editing one another's work in a wiki, and my community college students haven't jumped on the bandwagon - yet.

But in the K12 environment, students do well with wikis. I have used wikis for group projects where students are required to write a paper together based on their research. Each group sets up a wiki (or subset of pages within our class wiki). They use some pages to plan their research, record findings, and then the final page, where they write their paper.

Writing skills always need improvement in the K12 crowd, so a wiki lends itself well to that goal. Writing for an audience increases the level of writing for most students (sorry - I don't have the research references for that - but they're out there somewhere!). The process of collaborating in the wiki gets students discussing about the writing process. They plan an outline for their work (in the best of circumstances). They argue over the best way to write a sentence to convey what they want to say and then come to a consensus. The process of working through these issues together seems to really help the struggling writers.

I like the wiki as a format for group work because I can see who has been contributing and who has been sitting to the side. I can intervene as necessary during the course of the project.

Melanie

[Catherine Lombardozzi]

I have used wikis as the engine for project work in an adult learning / instructional design course, rather than using the discussion feature of Blackboard.

Here's my specific example: I asked students to research specific adult learning theories and to post their summaries of those theories (with links). I then asked students to edit, add to, and comment on the theories, and specifically to generate a list of implications of each of the theories. The idea was to create a resource that would be helpful for a later project where students analyzed their techniques for their degree of alignment with adult learning theories. The exercise was only partially successful (I've done it just the one time so far.)

Lessons learned (for this exercise):
> Set up the wiki site in advance with templates for where you want information to be so that students capture the right detail for the assignment, and so that there is some uniformity to how the info is presented.
> Be very specfic about the information you want in the postings, and what you want other people to contribute to each other's pages.
> Create a "how to" page because some people will be totally unfamiliar with how to use a wiki. Especially provide direction on editing and commenting (how to, and when to use each).
> I totally relate to those who said that people are afraid to edit... I'm not sure I'm going to be able to change that - editing will only work in this context if there is a great deal of trust among the participants (which doesn't seem to apply to wikipedia, but that's a different animal altogether). Instead, I think I'm going to model asking questions in the text in order to get students to elaborate on points... (so the original poster can clarify), adding additional content myself in some places, and using comments for reactions and other feedback. This particular assignment is too short-lived to get too complicated...
> Additional recommendations welcome.

This is a relatively simple assignment, but it's been a good training ground for me as an instructor... I'm getting a feel for how to make it work.

But here's a real challenge - wikis can sometimes be quite messy!! Different contributors have different ways of presenting information. So creating some sort of reference database or study aid that everyone will be comfortable accessing is quite challenging. This will be especially daunting when I think about launching a wiki inside my organization - people like their databases well structured. Any thoughts about this?

[Virginia Yonkers]

I just had too much to put down here so I blogged about it. Basically, my post explains how I used the same wiki and exercise over two semesters with 3 classes participating and the lessons I learned in using the wiki. The bottom line is that the learning that takes place, in my experience, is outside of the wiki and hard to capture. Therefore, I think the wiki should be a tool to promote learning, but there needs to be a lot of instructor scaffolding and design for a wiki to be used effectively as a learning tool (as opposed to just a collaboration tool).

[Kate]

Thank you for taking the time to describe specific examples of how you set up your wikis and how students worked with the wikis.

I'm curious about a couple of things.You state in your blog that the "wiki is a collaboration tool not a collaboration piece" which explains why wikis may not satisfy a summative evaluation scheme. Were you able to apply any formative assessment for the groups working with the wikis? Did you discover any patterns in terms of who took the responsibility to communicate the messy process into a result or product?

[Catherine Lombardozzi]

Great post, Virginia, thanks! I agree with you. Your comment that "it't the process, not the product" is a great reminder.

[Virginia Yonkers]

Catherine, I agree that wikis can get messy (read the blog post linked in the comment above). If I were you, I would have students blog about their learning in order to capture what they learned (and don't worry about the "messiness"). In fact, you can then have them address the messiness, and how it affects their learning and/or assumptions. You might also use the activity as a time delay. Have them do the first part in the beginning of the training/semester. Then have them go back at the end of the training/semester, and review what they have. Have them then edit or even create a new document from the old and discuss the differences.

[Catherine Lombardozzi]

Thanks for these specific suggestions... I especially like the idea of having the students themselves "clean it up" so it will be useful to them later... or I could help them define what would make it useful (rather than defining that myself) so it works for them from the beginning. I'm getting a lot of terrific ideas from the conversation and examples being contributed in this module and I look forward to giving them a try.

[Michele Martin]

Kate asked me to share some examples of how I use wiki "handouts" to support face-to-face training. Here's one I did for a day-long workshop I did on teaching how to job search with social media. I also did a training for ASTD Cascadia on blogging, podcasting and screencasting and used this wiki. Look at the Beginner links because that's the track I taught. And here's a simple one I used to teach career assessment to Job Corps staff.