Uses of Wikis in Teaching
Joe Grohens (Instructor, English Department)
Norma Scagnoli (Program Coordinator, Curriculum Technology and Education Reform (CTER) Online Masters program)
Joe Grohens and Norma Scagnoli discussed the educational use of wikis and showed examples of how they use wiki-based web sites in their own teaching. Along with discussing the general uses of wikis, both presenters spoke about the various advantages, disadvantages, and challenges of using wikis as a central component in their courses.
Presentation Summary - Joe Grohens
Joe Grohens presented the first half of the brown bag and began his presentation by providing an overview of the advanced composition course that he is currently teaching, B&TW 261: Principles of Technical Communication. This course is composed of mostly junior and senior engineering and business majors, most of whom have little writing experience. The wiki of choice used by Grohens in his classes for the past 2 or 2 1/2 years is MediaWiki, which is a versatile wiki that can be modified for design and layout, although Grohens prefers to use the standard MediaWiki template.
According to Grohens, a wiki is simply "a kind of a web site that lets visitors to the web pages edit those pages." For the most part, wikis are commonly thought to be collaborative writing tools, but the simplicity and ease-of-use of wikis compels Grohens to use wikis as a total course management system. For Grohens, the course wiki is an easy place to post assignment instructions, to organize course material, and to have students submit their writing. Wikis can be password-protected so that others cannot easily change the content of the pages, but Grohens only protects the course home page, and allows students free-range to write to and revise their own pages on the wiki. Grohens said that he hasn't had any problems with not having a password-protected wiki, and instead found that the openness of the wiki provides students with quick and easy access to do online writing.
Grohens offered three main reasons why he uses a wiki in his course. First and foremost, wikis provide an easy way to manage course content as well as an easy way for students to submit their writing assignments. In the past, Grohens used the discussion boards on Blackboard, but felt that the "threads" were difficult to wade-through, read, and comment on. The set up of the discussion boards did not allow students to easily revise their work, and when it came time to grade, Grohens found it difficult to sort-through the many different drafts of students' work which for the most part were all done in separate files. In contrast, wikis allow students to build a portfolio of their work in one place, but still allow instructors to see the different drafts that students work on without having to wade-through numerous documents.
Second, wikis build a sense of community which gives students the feeling that they are working on a unified endeavor. Grohens has his students work on wikis regularly, at least once or twice a week in a computer classroom as well as outside of class. The regularity of using wikis helps his students to learn from each other and to know that they have other students in the class who can read their work and help them to revise their work. This shared learning experience is especially useful to help students create their best work. Finally, Grohens maintains that an added benefit of using wikis in his courses is that students learn some knowledge of web design and HTML. In past courses, Grohens taught his students how to use DreamWeaver to create web pages, but found that this wasted a lot of time, and the use of wikis provides students some web design and HTML knowledge without having to learn a complicated program.
Wikis are especially useful for writing classes because they encourage students to do frequent revisions and drafts, they provide a medium that is useful for student collaboration, and they encourage students to provide feedback to each other. Moreover, wikis allow instructors to capitalize on the public nature of writing. Grohens explained that since the work done on wikis are publicly available for anyone to read, students tend to do a better job with their writing, taking more care and effort to make their writing perfect because they know they will have a potentially large audience reading their work.
Grohens concluded his presentation by demonstrating some of the assignments that his students do in the wiki, showing how wikis are particularly useful for keeping a log of revisions of student work. Grohens commented that students overall like using wikis because they are easily accessible from any computer that has an Internet connection, and students can work on assignments at any time. Moreover, since most of the students in Grohens class are engineering majors and do not get many writing assignments, this tool allows him to build his students' confidence about their writing, since they write frequently and are allowed to start small and continually revisit and edit their work to make it better.
Presentation Summary - Norma Scagnoli
Norma Scagnoli presented the second half of the brown bag and spoke about her research regarding the best educational uses of wikis by university faculty. Scagnoli first provided an example of an instructor who uses "core topics" in wiki assignments. The instructor provides students with a list of core topics, the students pick a topic that they would like to write on individually, and they then write on that topic all semester. These core topics are then used as a reference for the following semesters. Scagnoli finds this method helpful as it is a way to build a pool of knowledge about the core issues in one's discipline or field of study. In another example of faculty use of wikis, Scagnoli spoke about an instructor who uses wikis in a graduate seminar, asking students ahead of time what they are interested in and what they want to get out of the course, and then uses that information to create his syllabus for the semester. Essentially, the instructor uses the wiki to co-create the syllabus and co-create the class schedule with his students.
Along with doing research on the faculty use of wikis, Scagnoli recently began to use wikis in a course that she co-teaches in the CTER program, which is an online, distance learning course. Scagnoli does a "create a book" activity online where students work collaboratively on a topic of interest. She did a search in Wikipedia and found that there wasn't much information on blended learning in K-12 education, so she decided to use Wikibooks to create a wiki book with her students on blended learning. The students are online students, so they all have to login to the wiki to contribute writing to the wiki. Scagnoli started the Wikibooks by creating the main headings for the book, and the students then created the sub-headings with corresponding information. She also did two Wikibooks in Spanish with two other distance learning courses that she taught.
Scagnoli recommends that instructors use public sites for wikis, because the large public sites such as Wikipedia and Wikibooks are monitored by outside people. If the outside viewers saw something wrong with the students' work, they would either correct the mistake or tell the students. Scagnoli thinks this is a good lesson because it illustrates that there are actually people outside of the course who care about the quality of the students' work. However, Scagnoli cautions that working in public spaces is good as long as the public spaces are huge like Wikipedia and Wikibooks because those spaces are actually being monitored. Along with being monitored for quality, using large public wikis in courses is also useful because the wiki remains up and running after the class is over. Other course management systems, such as Moodle, do not allow student access after the semester is over, hence limiting students from continuing to access their work. Moreover, wikis are valuable learning tools because they have an accountability function (history function) that allows instructors to check how, when, and where students participated and contributed to the wiki. Instructors are able to compare two different versions of the wiki, and are also able to recover lost versions of the wiki.
Through her research study, Scagnoli concluded that wikis promote collaborative learning among students. The strengths of wikis include: they are easy to share (no need to send files over email); everyone involved in the class can access the same version of work; previous versions of work can be recovered; they allow for collaboration and collaboration over time; and they provide valuable learning skills and attitudes of group work. However, wikis have some challenges which include: the problems involved with plagiarism and copyright issues; the problem of outside editors (you never know if someone is going to come to your class and edit/change the work of your students); monitoring who does what might be difficult; and if students forget to login there is no way for the instructor to give students credit for their work.
About the Presenters
Joe Grohens is a Lecturer in Department of English at the Univerity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Norma Scagnoli has been the Program Coordinator for the Curriculum Technology and Education Reform (CTER) Online Masters program since Fall 2001. She has been involved in research on distance education and online learning since 1998. She has given papers and presentations about online education in local and international settings. Norma has a Bachelor's degree in English as a Second Language, holds a Master's degree in Education, and is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Resource Education at Illinois. Her research interests include online learning in academic and corporate settings, and instructional design of e-learning and blended learning.
|
