Matthew Allen

I recently answered an email from a colleague asking for advice about wikis, especially in the face of his university’s (inevitable) suspicion about anything that is not authorised, locked-down, served from the campus and generally (IMO) unusable for agile teaching and learning. I thought I would share an edited version of my views, since it neatly captures some of what I’ve been thinking about as part of my ALTC project on Web 2.0 and online learning.

Agile teaching: responding to needs and concerns in the learning design of students’ experiences, activities and tasks which takes account of current events, new technologies in ways that institutionalised curriculum design and enterprise technology practices can’t cope with because they are too structured, clumsy and slow-moving. Agile teaching implies agility of mind as well as design and technology – it’s being playful, picking up and putting down, making limited and short-term commitments to particular ways of teaching and content, on the basis that it’s more fun, more engaging and ultimately more realistic as an educator and thinker to be moving forward, not circling the bureaucratic wagons

 

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Yes, we use wikis in our teaching, in two ways. First, some of the students naturally set up wikis to work on collaborative projects or similar without us telling them to – we leave that up to them! They also use other technologies, such as Ning and similar networking sites/services and, of course, simpler forms of communication and collaboration. Wikis perhaps are suited only to some kinds of people for this task?

Second, we run a unit of study in which students are required to author their first assignment in a wiki – but not collaboratively (they look at others, but don’t edit). Then, their second main assignment – a group report – must be online and while we provided an alternative publishing space (openzine.com) they didn’t like it and so all, I think, ended up using a wiki. This year (semester 2) we will require them to use a wiki. Elaine Tay and I have written a paper about this unit and how we use wikis – currently about ready for submission for publication. Briefly, we concluded, it’s not the wiki itself, but the social affordances of groupwork that are the most important learning design consideration: wikis are too open a technology to really constrain or require a form of collaboration unless you create the social context for it. Note that an unexpected outcome was that students benefited from seeing each other’s individual work and, as far as we can tell, there was no great worry about it. Some ideas about this were presented to the Teaching Learning Forum in Perth this year.

I should add – we also used to use a wiki as the place where students doing a whole-of-group collaborative project on virtual communities would create and publish their material. We used a wiki like this in the mid-2000s and it has been a great success though, recently, as numbers have grown (that unit now has 100+ students online), it has not worked as well and we’ve changed our thinking (see below re the online conference). What we loved about this wiki environment is the way it challenged the students to imagine the form and structure of the collaborative presentation, not just the content. It enabled task division – some people did more design work, others more content work. It also promoted a sense of student ownership – what made this task authentic was the students’ own taking of responsibility in the snowfield of the blank wiki!

So, in short, you can and in some cases should use wikis in teaching. I think the most important affordances of wikis are as follows.

• The fact that the process of creating and editing wiki pages is relatively simple, and yet produces a shared resource, makes this software a very powerful tool for managing knowledge work within a group whose abilities and knowledge of the content of the site varies as much as their technical skill.
• Wikis permit (and even promote) collaborative individualism. Traditional cooperative publishing activities tend to require a lot of discussion of what to change and how to do it, before you actually make changes, create content etc. Wikis allow individuals to jump in and work relatively safely and the collaboration – the forming of the group happens in the process of editing and developing the content.
• Plus, at a very simple level, a wiki rapidly allows us to get material online, shared, reading and writing and thinking about audiences – whether all the other students or (preferably) a real audience of web users

If you look at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ you will see a listing of 100s of wiki engines and sites. Some would need to be installed and run from a server (think mediawiki for example), others are hosted (like pbwiki). I’ve not looked at a lot of them in detail recently but have been using http://wikidot.com – this is free, but with ads and some restrictions. It’s cheap to buy a license however. Personally I like it, but my colleagues think I am nuts! They tend to go with pbwiki, now available via http://pbworks.com/ but the cost is an issue. Just had a quick play with wikimatrix and I suspect you will find better free solutions. The key reason to pay money is to get finegrain control over access / publicness etc and/or lose the adverts. I doubt size is an issue that would make you pay money.

A recent interesting development which might work for a small group (since I am unsure how stable it is) would be http://www.springnote.com. The beauty of springnote is that it wraps up a wiki approach in a metaphor (the notebook) and some visual clues. It’s primarily aimed at private (eg not publicly accessible) work by individuals OR groups Or both in the same space. But it can be exported to a public site. I’d caution against using it with more than 10-20 students at first, and you should download / backup regularly. I discussed Springnote recently at the University of NSW:

Part of the problem with wikis is that they are highly unstructured and can be challenging to manage in terms of access / revision etc. It was a 3-week online conference, students submitting 2000 word papers in 1 of 4 streams (after major assistance with improving the papers). Students then read papers, commented and replied to comments on their own papers. We used WordPress (a blogging engine but which actually is more like a content management system these days) installed on a server I pay for in the US. It worked absolutely fine – 85-90% of students have said they learned more this way than from normal study mode. Most students were external, but not all. The challenge, though, is to design the learning experience – this approach worked because it was a social event, culturally encoded and built into the assessment, teaching and feedback structure of the unit.

So, in short: wikis work. Choosing a wiki is a personal matter and thank goodness for wikimatrix! Making it work, however, remains an exercise in teaching – that often-forgotten aspect of ‘learning technologies’, ‘the student experience’ and so on. Teaching with a wiki involves careful assessment design, strong encouragement and endorsement of its use and, in the end, a realistic and believable purpose for it. Otherwise students will simply dismiss it as ‘technocrap’.

Tags: ALTC, ALTC-Link, elearning, higher education, Web 2.0, wiki

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 11:47 and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.