Wikis in education: social construction as learning

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2006 by Robinson, Marc

THE USE OF WIKIS in education has increased dramatically over the last two years. Web entries and conference sessions abound, but there is still a lot of confusion about what Wikis are and how to use them. In a short amount of space, I can't possibly provide all that you might want to know about Wikis, but I can say emphatically that they are effective tools for educators.

The most familiar Wiki is Wikipedia, a "Webbased free-content multilingual encyclopedia project. It is... a website that allows any visitor to freely edit its content" (Wikipedia, 2006). Although Wikipedia has been the subject of a few scandals over inaccuracies-an accepted risk of the format-a peer review of several articles found Wikipedia's accuracy is similar to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Giles, 2005). As such, it can be a good starting point for research.

The good news is that Wikipedia, as a product (and with all of its flaws) is not the subject I want to cover. Rather, I would like to share the ways in which Wikis-as a process tool -can be used by educators. The real promise of Wikis, and what makes them such a powerful educational technique, is the fact that Wikis facilitate group collaboration. Another important educational feature is the Wiki's ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. At a glance, a reader can see how the document evolved, who made alterations, and whether they were substantive. If the need arises, users can "roll back" the document to a previous version.

Wikis must be well thought out and integrated into a rigorous assessment plan. As with other well-designed group assessments, the following specific elements have proven very important in effectively using Wikis:

1. Identifying the task that students are to perform.

2. Identifying and defining the composition of the group and the way the group is formed.

3. Identifying the way that the task is distributed within and among groups.

4. Identifying the mode(s) of interaction.

5. Identifying the timing of the phases (Dillenbourg, 1999).

The first educational Wiki that I saw was a comparison of two Shakespeare plays. The instructor started with two statements-something such as, "The Tempest is a Shakespearean tragedy about two star-crossed lovers. It is very different from Macbeth, which is a historical account of legendary Danish Prince Amleth." The students then collaboratively altered and built on the statements until there was a well-cited 10-page paper. According to the instructor, the quality surpassed anything that an individual student had ever done in her classes. As an interesting side note, this instructor also used a Wiki to build a shared list of student and instructor responsibilities for each class section.

In addition to group authoring, Wikis also have many other uses in education-and in the "real world" workplace. According to Mader (2005), educators, scientists, and employees worldwide are using Wikis to build courseware, develop papers, track projects, and review classes and teachers. Some examples that I have seen include:

* Building courseware. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted Charles Nesson, a renowned professor at Harvard Law School, who teamed with his daughter and others to offer a course on argument via second Life-an internet virtual world. What went unnoticed by The Chronicle is the fact that the Nessons used a WIki to collaboratively build the course (http://cyber.law. harvard.edu/cyberone/wiki/ Main_Page).

* Developing a paper or project individually and receiving peer review. Using a Wiki, a student can write, receive feedback, revise, and submit an assignment. At each point in the assignment, the instructor and other students can suggest resources, provide guidance, or review grammar and punctuation. The instructor and other students can see the evolution of the paper over time, offering insight into the critical thinking skills of the author.

* Tracking group projects. Wikis are now being used extensively to track and complete group projects in the workplace and in the classroom. Websites like Jotspot (http://www.jot. com/), Google spreadsheets, and iRows (http://www.irows. com/) have tools such as calendars and online spreadsheets, making the tracking of group projects easier.

* Reviewing classes and teachers. A group of students at Brown University started the Course Advisor Wiki (http://caw.wikispaces.com/) as a community-building tool and as a place for students and instructors to collaboratively write reviews of courses. The reviews tend to be more positive and focused than their counterparts on http:// www .ratemyprofessor. com/.

I hope my review has piqued your curiosity about using Wikis and dispelled some of the ambiguity surrounding their educational use. I do believe that Wikis offer opportunities for sound collaboration and assessment, limited only by the creative ways we find to include them in our classes.

References:

Collaborative-learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. (pp. 1-19). Oxford: Elsevier. Retrieved September 8, 2006 from: http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/publicat/dil-papers-2/Dil.7.1. H.pdf.