Wikis

With the easy availability of wiki hosting and development tools, such as PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Mediawiki, wikis are becoming a favoured social software tool in education (Wheeler, Yeomans & Wheeler, 2008, p.989). They are being used for “collaborative writing of documentation and essays, brainstorming, bulletin boards...project status updates, or persistent discussion boards” (Watson, Boudreau, York, & Greiner, 2008, p.79). However, Cole (2009) suggests the use of wikis in an educational context depends on the teacher’s preferred method of instruction and that Wikis are less suited to behaviourist models and more applicable to constructivist and collaborative learning models (p. 142).

Wikis are collaborative by design and “it is the collective (e.g. class) activities that give rise to content formation, structure, and (indefinite) growth” (Lund, 2008, p. 41). Traditionally, writing activities have been undertaken as individual assignments. The use of wikis, where “interdependency is not an option but its rationale” (Lund, 2008, p.41) will require a shift in practice from instruction that focuses on individual learning towards more collective, social learning. Wenger (2003) identifies communities of practice as “the basic building blocks of a social learning system” (p. 80). Communities of practice consist of groups of individuals who share their collective knowledge and learn from each other as they work together towards a common goal (Wenger, 2003). Achterman (2006) supports the use of wikis for knowledge acquisition. He finds “some of the most exciting research happens when students collaborate to pool their research and analyze their data, forming a kind of understanding that would be difficult for an individual student to achieve” (Achterman, 2006, p. 19).

A key feature of the constructivist model of learning is that each individual “constructs his or her own unique meaning through his or her own cognitive processes” (Brooks & Brooks, 1999, p. 20). In their research on the use of wikis in a social studies classroom, Heafner & Friedman (2008) found wikis had the “potential to shift student uses of the internet from the static recollection of facts...to a scenario in which students are actively engaged in the subject matter in order to develop their own understandings, and thus become generators of knowledge” (p. 300). Further, Brooks & Brooks (1999) state “when students want to know more about an idea, a topic, or an entire discipline, they put more cognitive energy into classroom investigations and discussions and study more on their own” (p. 20). However, Heafner & Friedman (2008) also reported students who created wikis did not perform as well as the control group who received more traditional teacher-centered instruction when administered end of term tests. Nevertheless, they found students who created wikis retained more content knowledge and had a broader understanding of the topic being researched (Heafner & Friedman, 2008, p. 300).


References

Achterman, D. (2006). Beyond "Wikipedia". Teacher Librarian, 34(2), pp. 19-22.

Brooks, M. & Brooks, J. (1999). The courage to be constructivist. Educational Leadership, 57 (3), pp. 18-24.

Cole, M. (2009). Using wiki technology to support student engagement: Lessons from the trenches. Computers & Education, 52(1), pp. 141-146.

Heafner, T., & Friedman, A. (2008). Wikis and constructivism in secondary social studies: Fostering a deeper understanding. Computers in the Schools, 25(3/4), pp. 288-302.

Lund, A. (2008). Wikis: A collective approach to language production. ReCALL, 20(1), pp. 35-54.

Watson, R., Boudreau, M., York, P., Greiner, M., & Wynn, D. (2008). Opening the classroom. Journal of Information Systems Education, 19(1), pp. 75-85.

Wenger, E. (2003). Communities of practice and social learning systems. In Nicolini, D., Gherardi, S., & Yanow, D., Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-based Approach. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Wheeler, S., Yeomans, P., & Wheeler, D. (2008). The good, the bad and the wiki: Evaluating student-generated content for collaborative learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), pp. 987-995.

Additional Readings on Wikis

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?. EDUCAUSE Review, 41(2), pp. 33-44. Retrieved February 6, 2009, from http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/Web20ANewWaveofInnovation/40615.

Bryant, T. (2006). Social software in academia. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, 29(2), pp. 61-64. Retrieved January 26, 2009, from http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/SocialSoftwareinAcademia/39976.

Choy, S., & Ng, K. (2007). Implementing wiki software for supplementing online learning. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 23(2), pp. 209-226. Retrieved February 8, 2009, from http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet23/choy.html.

Morgan, B., & Smith, R. (2008). A wiki for classroom writing. Reading Teacher, 62(1), pp. 80-82.