Wicked Wikis

I recently posted about blogging and the potential applications of blogs in the teaching context.

Wikis are another example of a digital technology suitable for educational use, and are essentially basic websites that can be edited by users. This is an important difference between wikis and blogs, although there are a number of other conceptual) and technical differences.

In contrast to a blog, which essentially facilitates chronological reflection by a single user (with comments able to be provided by others), wikis are much more collaborative and open-ended. They are conceptually very simple, a ‘blank page’ which can be viewed, edited and overwritten by users. This is an important consideration for both teachers and the students using the wiki. A SWOT analysis of wikis is provided below.

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Strengths	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
·       Constructivist tool that encourages learning through social interaction. ·        Wikis facilitate collaboration and group interaction more effectively than blogs. ·        Teachers and students a great deal of flexibility in how the wiki ‘looks and feels’. ·        Wikis allow you to easily link between different pages on the same wiki, as well as to external content (websites, youtube videos etc.). ·        Entries can be tracked and date stamped. ·        Create positive peer pressure. ·        The level of complexity in a wiki can be tailored to students’ age level.	·         Although wikis allow group interaction, they do not allow authors to change content concurrently. ·        The multi-user nature of wikis means that a set of rules are necessary to manage responsible use.	·        Huge range of applications – teachers can creatively adapt wikis to serve a range of purposes. ·        Using wikis provides teachers with an opportunity to integrate behaviours across different contexts (e.g. a set of rules about rights, responsibilities, respect, netiquette etc. may be relevant to the classroom, wiki use, blogging and other social medias that are used at home). ·        Can provide feedback/insight for teachers about student learning and the effectiveness of their own teaching methods.	·        Risk that students accidentally delete or write over others’ work. ·        Parents/families may not embrace the use of wikis at home for a variety of reasons. ·        Students have differing levels of technological competency and attitudes towards using technology.

In order to get my head around the technical affordances of a wiki site, I experimented with my own wiki by setting up a ‘fake’ learning activity for a group of students.

The very basic activity I created on my wiki would allow students to participate in a group debate. I created a number of pages on my wiki to support this online activity, including a main Debating Chamber and a number of debate-related pages, each of which elaborated on the core activity in some way (i.e. Debating Rules and student Debating Glossary). The Debating Chamber introduced the concept of debating and defined the topic (“it is better to read a book than see a movie”). Similar to the Mobile Phones wiki activity in Week 2, the activity culminated in students entering their debating arguments/rebuttals into a table. The Debating Chamber contained links to the other related pages within my wiki. I was also able to add a hyperlink to another website which features a video of real primary students engaged in a debating competition. The wiki activity contained an embedded youtube animation introducing the debating process.

As a (very) novice wiki user, once I familiarised myself with the wiki functions, I was able to set up this activity relatively easily. I could also have provided links to appropriate sites for research, uploaded various images and created pages for students to prepare their debating material or discuss approaches. The debating activity could have been further scaffolded by use of a thinking tool like de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.

Given the success I had in setting up this basic wiki activity, I can see the potential for incorporating wikis into learning. A wiki would be a fantastic epicentre for a class, serving as an information hub, communication resource and platform for educational exercises and extension work. Wikis provide an easy way for students, parents and teachers to communicate. There are a huge number of educational resources and wiki examples available online.

Wikis can be tailored for different learning types and to help students move from lower to higher order thinking, according to Bloom’s taxonomy. As an example, wikis can support the following types of activities:

• Knowledge – answer recall questions based on a text, remember the wiki rules, define relevant terminology in a glossary;
• Comprehension – understand grammatical/semantic rules for a correction competition;
• Application – modify the end of a choose-your-own-adventure story, solve collaborative maths tasks, group authoring;
• Analysis – scaffolded PMI activities to compare and contrast;
• Synthesis – compile a new class textbook; and
• Evaluation – critique a text, participate in a class debating activity and research projects.

Something that I came across this week in the course of my research into wikis was the 'flipped classroom’. The idea is that teachers create a digital library of learning resources which are used in place of traditional lecture style classroom teaching. Classroom time is instead used for active learning and class collaboration (hence traditional school learning and homework are ‘flipped’). Wikis would be an ideal tool for use in this context.

Audrey Watters, in her Hack Education blog, describes the work of Reich and suggests that although wikis are designed to facilitate collaboration, they are not frequently used in this way.  As with any ICT tool, I think it’s critical that the use of wikis in the classroom is accompanied by clear learning goals as well as technical and pedagogical competency.