I am not sure why, but understanding what a wiki actually is has been hard to wrap my head around.  I thought it was just like any other web page, but I was wrong. Like most people when i hear the word wiki my mind connects to Wikipedia. When I was in high school and college it was taught that Wikipedia was an unreliable source due the fact that anyone anywhere can change it.  It was taboo. Don’t use it, don’t reference it.  So when I began to learn about wiki I could not help but associate it with Wikipedia.  The readings this week were helpful in debunking some of my learned biases against Wikipedia.

What I Learned About Wiki

• A wiki is a website that allows users to not only have access to the content on the site but to revise and change it.
• Wikis are social, that is they allow the sharing of knowledge for the purpose of learning. (People are not actually present but leave their content as an artifact of their presence.)
• Once a person starts a wiki then each member of the group, that has access, can contribute their own knowledge to the wiki.
• A wiki can be public or private.
• Wikis can have multiple pages and the information on the wiki is displayed in the order in which it is posted.

Here is a short book I created using Book Creator about what a wiki is. Book Creator

Knowledge Building

I spent quite a bit of time exploring the Flat Classroom Project by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis.  According to what I read about the Flat Classroom Project it is an online global connection between learners across the world to collaborate and co-create on a project.  I find the notion of flattening the walls of the classroom and extending learning opportunities global, fascinating. According to the website, “The aim in this project is to encourage students in different places to collaborate, not just communicate, and to enhance understanding of cultures and lifestyles beyond the immediate environment.” Cress and Kimmerie (2007) state that when a person contributes “to the development of a wiki a person first has to externalize his/her knowledge.”  Through the process of externalization a person’s knowledge can deepen.  This occurs because it is necessary when writing about a topic to restructure it in a way that will make sense to your readers and relate it to other information on the wiki that another author may have written. With the use of a wiki the students are building and transferring new knowledge and this allows them opportunities to internalize the information learned. When new knowledge is internalized it interacts with prior knowledge, or schema, and creates new knowledge combining prior and newly acquired knowledge.  If we look at the text  by Ulrike Cress and Joachim Kimmerie, the authors reference the work of Piaget in that with the use of wiki a person can acquire information learned and use it to change their schema to better understand the information; essentially they are modifying and creating new schema.  This theory of Piaget can be applied to the Flat Classroom Project because the students are continuously acquiring information through collaboration with others and reorganizing and structuring it to interact with their own individual schema.  This knowledge bullding occurs when they are externalizing and internalizing information from the wiki.

Knowledge Police (Monitoring)

With all of the online revising, editing, and collaborating there has to be a way to ensure that the information put on the wiki is accurate and valid. Just how do they do that?  When I read the article How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, I found my answer.  Wikipedia has a group of editors who developed five policies to safeguard the reliability of the work.

1. Free Content; all writing must be original and can be edited and reused by others
2. Reliable Sources; information that is the most reliable is fact checked by third-party sources such as academic journals, published books by academic presses , and newspapers
3. Neutral POV; written work should be free of bias and include all significant viewpoints
4. Notability; topic is of importance and has reliable sources
5. Good Faith; all users add their work with the intent to better the content of the wiki

After reading the five policies from Wikipedia’s editors I was honestly still a bit skeptical. It wasn’t until I read How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool by Adrianne Wadewitz that I understood. Wadewitz compares the global editing and collaborating on a wiki to that of the authors of the encyclopedia. Both a wiki and an encyclopedia are collections of information gathered and refined by multiple writers and it may be impossible to expect it to be completely free of bias and misconceptions, no matter how hard the writer tries to do so.  Of course having such an amazing amount of content on a wiki such as Wikipedia, it can be assumed that not all information can be checked in a timely manner. In addition, having a wiki on a larger scale with a multitude of collaborators, the more people involved in adding and editing content the more challenging it may be to authenticate the work, while on the other hand the more contributors involved also increases the information and content to be learned.  The authors of the text said it perfectly when they stated that “a person’s individual knowledge is a resource for other peoples’ learning.” (Kafai, 2006; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994)

As teachers creating a wiki for student use in the classroom I would make sure that privacy policies are established so that the students can focus on having a shared collaborative resource that only they can revise and edit. Keeping the wiki small, either within the class or with just a small group of students working together it may be easier for the teacher to monitor the quality of information the students are adding to the wiki. One way to create a wiki in a small group may be to have students work on a class wiki for an ongoing science investigation.  Students can begin by adding their schema about the investigation and predictions as to what might happen next.  As they investigate teams can add their data, new schema, and predictions based on their new evidence as well as interact with each other to determine what steps they might take next in their investigation. By allowing the students to act as contributors to the wiki as well as collaborators with other teams they have opportunities to both externalize and internalize their knowledge and to infer and deepen their knowledge.

Teaching students about the five key policies are essential prior to them creating and collaborating on a wiki yet it is not fool proof.  No matter what age our students are, they may be writing opinions and misconceptions on their wiki.  We can hope that others on their wiki team will find and fix errors but it might not happen.

Check out this link to a video that explains what a wiki is.  The video is very simple and for me that was extremely helpful!