Wikis in education
Educational focus
- Collaboration
- Communication and knowledge sharing
- Knowledge building
- Analysis, synthesis, evaluation
- Storing and managing information
- Presentation and dissemination
Benefits of wikis
With the right educational design, and with good teaching, wikis have many benefits in the educational setting:
Intellectual and writing
- Encourages writing
- Encourages reading
- Encourages integration of diverse perspectives
- Teaches appropriate expression of scholarly opinion
- Improves writing skills
- Promotes interpretation, validation, assessment, analysis, critique, synthesis, evaluation.
Communication, collaboration, participation, socialisation
- Encourages collaboration and teamwork
- Facilitates communication
- Engagement in the community
- Audience — you can have readers in the wider world
- Appropriate online behaviour
- Easy sharing of info
Motivation and organisation
- Control and ownership on the part of the wiki writers
- Students try harder when they know their work is being published to the world
- Easy self-publication
Management
- Ease of feedback from both teacher, other students, and the world in general
- Allows for searching if pages are tagged
- You (and the students) can track learning progress through time through the page history function
- Easy communication with students and parents
Classroom benefits (Oradini and Saunders 2007)
- Easier for students to submit their work
- Easier for the tutor to view work quickly
- Helps in the monitoring of student progress
- Provides templates to enable scaffolding of student progress
- Facilitates provision of both formative and summative feedback
- Allows students to be more creative
- Saves time when collecting work
- Accessible anywhere
Links and resources
Learning Technologies Centre Connectivism course wiki
Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom
Teaching with Thinking and Technology
Wiki experiences in the classroom
Using ICTs to support higher order thinking (DECS SA, pdf)
Wikis in the classroom (DET, WA)
Blogs and wikis, Bemidji State University