Before I begin about this week, last week was an interesting experiment with working with the class wiki. I found it neat that I could put in a first version, look at other people’s wikis and make some improvements, I found myself often going “oh yeah”, I can talk about this or summarize the category and provide additional links. It is a pretty neat experience and I could see the “neatness” growing if others were to look at my 5 technology tools and expand on personal experience or other things they have found. It would be quite the collaborative experience.
This week, we were asked to read 3 articles, all revolving around the idea of wikis and how we can utilize them for learning. I found two of my readings to have drawn me in a bit.
In “The power of wikis” (Schweder & Wissick, 2009), I found the list of 10 ways wikis can be used in education to be quite interesting to think about. It is amazing to think about how a wiki was designed to allow a community to grow a topic and how from one idea we then expanded into multiple functions, some of which I imagine were unexpected. Curriculum Planning was the first one that makes so much sense that I would have never thought to use it for this purpose. Using a wiki to map out a unit or an entire course could be so beneficial because everyone can contribute, add in notes and see everything. The other one I found interesting (mostly because I had mentioned earlier if I could do something like this with my programming class as a way to contribute tags and codes for students to see) was the Math Encyclopedia where students can contribute new knowledge to this wiki and have a running view of everything they are learning. This could serve as a huge review, practice organizing information, allow students to have that important process time between new material. I could see myself having a Geometry wiki where students have to contribute new properties and then also link those properties to other properties that use it. This would serve as a great way to process the properties and convert that into long term memory and also allow students to apply that information.
The other article that invoked a more emotional response was the “How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool” (Wadewitz). This article struck a nerve in the sense that I strive for a classroom of equality for all and it is really important to not be blinded by how great a wiki and community-based learning can be. You have to keep in mind your population within that community. For example, Wikipedia had an issue with women being left out of history, primarily because someone chose to group the men in one page and the women in the other. A community dominated by a “corrupt” group could really cause a negative reaction to learning. So, even though a learning style based on community can provide you with lots of information, you still need to be critical to what you learn and really take into account on who really is contributing to this “brain” of a wiki page.
In general, I feel the knowledge building in a wiki occurs most by one person taking an initiative to make a page and add in what details they are familiar with. Afterwards, those with common interests then find that page and contribute their knowledge to the page. I see this continuously happening until a page has been refined a decent amount and has been processed over and over again. The wonderful thing about this process is the original creator can then see these changes and learn more, assimilate the information or challenge it. Through this non-stop collaboration (that could go over days), a person develops a deeper schema for the topic that was posted. As far as how learning can occur, this allows the brain to process information multiple times, thus rehearsing occurs and more than likely after this amount of time you are likely to have an emotional response to what you are seeing and reading that you will store this information into long-term memory, thus learning will occur.
I feel that wikis can provide a lot of valid learning and knowledge to an individual. My first thought is strictly on the fact that if it wasn’t valid, then Wikipedia wouldn’t be as big as it is or fan-page wiki’s (for TV shows, etc) wouldn’t have popped up as a major way of being a part of the community that enjoys that television show. I think the fact that a person is iterating through the same information over and over again to add additional information is a perfectly acceptable way to learn new information and adopt it into your way of life. In addition to the collaborative nature, I think there is a lot of merit in having a group of students take ownership over a wiki page. This way students have to do the entire process of learning, such as collecting information, finding pictures, determining which information is true, adding their own thoughts, reflections, logging; to generalize, I think through the use of a wiki, students could take learning into their own hands and learn the process of learning, which is a general goal I think we have as educators, to teach students to think how to think and to learn how to learn.
How can I use this…well here is one website that provides an idea in math class. http://divisbyzero.com/2010/02/24/using-wikis-in-mathematics-classes/
In general, this teacher has a wiki that students are making an answer key for all the homework problems. More importantly, the key is not just answers, but detailed explanations. This is a great way to get a class to contribute together, to find each others mistakes and make edits. In addition, students are going to be emotionally involved in doing homework and by explaining the process on the wiki. He found students were more likely to type in a whole new problem than to edit, which is important to note, but you could potentially drive this into a group competition — to want to post correctly and catch other group mistakes. Which group posting which problem could be anonymous for other students except for the teacher. Although the teacher reflects that students weren’t that interested in it, I would imagine with the right motivation and tweaking (and perhaps not making a solutions manual), could serve a great way to process, reflect, and review material.
Here is one last link providing some other ways to use wiki’s in math. In short, they all tend to either be a group working through problems and using the wiki to explain the entire process or individuals using the wiki to organize information into a “study guide” of sorts.
Hi Jeff,
I enjoyed reading your post this week as well as your responses on team member’s posts. One of the things that keeps challenging me with wikis in the classroom is the struggle I have with defining collaborative vs cooperative. I also wonder about how well this tool would work with underachievers and non-readers/writers. After reading your post tonight I started wondering how it would work if student A (perhaps a struggling student) started the wiki and wrote all they knew/learned on a subject. Then Student B expanded, followed by students C-Z. With all early contributors rechecking and noting what was added/changed. Hmmm… maybe a structure like that would work for knowledge construction. Just a crazy thought.
Cori
I think it is about the accountability. Perhaps you provide a rubric for a grade in which one category clearly states that you need to refine posts at certain dates, but before those dates, the other individuals have to make edits and expansions first. I am also concerned with Web 2.0 as a whole and students that just aren’t willing or choosing to learn for whatever reason it might be (some are outside of their control). One thing I have learned about high school students is that if you explain why you are doing something out of their usual schema of learning, they often give it a try, but there are always those students that won’t or can’t change to learn a new way. I do think the power of a wiki can be utilized in most classrooms is some capacity in which students have opportunities to reprocess the information over and over.
I loved your example the Mathmatics Wiki! I also think it was a great teaching method, for Dr. Sharma to give us a the example of using it and constructing the Wiki first, and then giving us more education about in the following week. It was a great way to reflect on what my paradigm was about Wiki’s, and using it that way, and then having expanded knowledge about it in following week. If you I guess I when I think of Wiki’s I think automatically of Wikipedia, and that isn’t necessary the best or most effective use of a true Wiki. Thanks again for sharing your example. If you have other’s I’d love to see them. Or even if you have a step by step guide on how you use it in the classroom, I’d love to see it. if you could email it to me separately I’d appreciate it!
This entire course is making is learn the way we would potentially teach this type of class. A really neat strategy of not only learning about it but truly living in it. Wikipedia definitely has a monopoloy on the idea of a wiki, but as we have seen, wiki’s can be for anything, a lot of people like to share what they know and providing on a wiki is one way to provide information to the world. I think we naturally would claw into the idea of a wiki because we like to show off what we know and if it is a topic we care about, we would like to see what others know and draw deeper connections. The question would then be, can a wiki be successful on a category that no one cares about or will we have to provide external motivation (such as grades) to promote learning through a wiki?
My students are starting a wiki right now in programming, where I broke our programming into each different project we do. Students then access the page and can add the new things they have learned into it and make additions. The neat part is then we have a library that we can reference down the road if they forget something.