Divya Madhavan

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USING WIKIS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

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Table Of Contents I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI Introducing Wiki Brief History Benefits Drawbacks Popular Tools Pedagogies Users Integration into Curriculum Use in my Instructional Design Conclusion References

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Divya Madhavan I. INTRODUCING WIKI

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According to Leuf and Cunningham (2001), a wiki is a freely expandable collection of interlinked web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information a database, where each page is easily edited by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client (p. 14). Simply put, wikis are a collection of dynamic web pages with open editing and WYSIWYG functionality for anyone to create, add or edit content. The best and most popular example of a wiki today is 'Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia'. The following diagram illustrates the structural difference between a traditional web page and a wiki page.
Source: http://www.udel.edu/sakai/training/printable/wiki/Wikis_in_Higher_Education_UD.pdf

The fundamental principles of wiki are as below (Educause, 2005). Wiki is open for anyone to change anything. Wiki uses simplified markup language that simplifies tagging and hyper linking. Wiki is a democratic tool with no sense of page authorship as its content is owned by the community as a whole. Wiki is continuously evolving and never finished. Wiki allows the user community to define its structure.

Divya Madhavan II. Wiki is protected by the community that creates it. Wiki focuses on the content and not on the aesthetic appeal.

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Wiki tracks every change and allows restoring the content to its previously edited versions. BRIEF HISTORY

As a software designer, Ward Cunningham developed the concept of Wiki in 1995. He was responsible for developing a system that would enable others to contribute to the repository of software engineering design patters. He built on the existing concept of HyperCard and transferred it to the web. He created the Portland Pattern Repository and named it the 'WikiWikiWeb' based on an airport shuttle bus in Hawaii that meant 'super quick'. He envisioned the wiki to be a fast web-publishing system. The tool became widely used with the emergence of Wikipedia that was founded by Larry Sanger in 2001. He opened up this project to the entire world to edit and create encyclopedic content. Although it started with a contribution of only few articles per month, it exploded in size and array of topics, with "over three million articles in English and ten million visitors per hour" (Anderson, 2012, p. 141). The growth of Wikipedia has taught valuable lessons about the usability, benefits and challenges of wikis in education. III. BENEFITS

Practical Benefit Using Wiki increases learner-learner interactions in distance learning courses. By allowing synchronous and asynchronous peer interactions, wiki helps to form a learnercentered environment in which they can learn collectively and constructively. The distance as a barrier is removed when the learners can easily collaborate on wiki to solve problems at their own pace, provide instant feedback to each other, clarify misunderstandings, and construct their knowledge base (Huang, 2010, p. 4).

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Ethical Benefit Through its lack of page structure that involves editing, commenting, and posting external links, Wiki enables students to engage in critical interaction about the content rather than plainly agreeing with or rejecting one anothers claims. They learn the art of providing constructive criticisms to each others work, as it is particularly important for research projects that require students to enter an academic conversation (Lundin, 2008, p. 440). Legal Benefit Wikis revision tracking mechanism allows teachers to monitor the integrity of student work and identify plagiarism and vandalism. Through this feature, Wiki also creates a sense of security for students by valuing intellectual work and giving authorial identity (Su and Beaumont, 2010, p. 426). Functional Benefit Wiki offers the ability to interact with an evolving document over time. It allows teachers and learners to see the evolution of a written task, and to continually comment on it, rather than offering comments only on the final draft (Duffy and Bruns, 2006, p. 35). IV. DRAWBACKS

Practical Drawback With teachers requiring sharing the authority of wiki spaces with students, they tend to fear that students might change important information or accidentally delete the ongoing course project, causing damage to the work of all other classmates. Although the changes and deleted pages can be restored using the revision tracking system, the teacher cannot continuously monitor all pages on a wiki to correct malicious or accidental changes, even if it is simple (Lundin, 2008, p. 444). The teachers also face difficulties with keeping up with new posts, organizing rapidly evolving content, and housekeeping to ward off errors in learning.

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Ethical Drawback According to Harold Ross, editing is the same as quarreling with writers and Lamb, if anybody can edit my text, then anybody can ruin my text. With the content developed in an open environment by so many collaborators around the world, there is a risk of the content being ruined or vandalized. Soft Security is an ethic that relies on the collective will of the community, rather than the technology, to enforce order (Lamb, 2004, p. 39). Legal Drawback With multiple authors involved in creating a wiki, the legal issues deal with owning copyright of individual contributions and issuing copyright licenses for reusing information in the wiki (Botterbusch and Parker, 2008, p. 7). Lamb (2004) points that it is very complex to own copyright in collaborative spaces as the work created by several anonymous authors from uncertain sources are perpetually in the process of development. Functional Drawback Wiki lacks explicit organizing structure and aesthetic appeal. Mayfield notes, "Except in rare instances where design creates function, the more you design the more user functionality you sacrifice. Wikis emphasize both reading and writing. Sure they could be a little more readable, but that would come at a cost for writing" (Lamb, 2004, p. 42). According to Cunningham, wikis lack of aesthetic appeal is a functional advantage as he finds that, the quality is deep, not at the surface. However, this results in a wiki that is plain, ugly and boring to read (Lamb, 2004, p. 43). V. POPULAR TOOLS

Google Docs Google Docs is a basic Wiki tool that allows the authors to edit an online document on a Google repository. The users can create and edit pages using the same registration as that of their Gmail

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accounts. Up to 15 GB of storage space is available for free. There are three levels of controls that determine the user privileges. The user can be authenticated to view, or view and comment, or view, comment and edit the document. The changes to the document are automatically saved at approximately 30-second intervals. The revision history is maintained and the author can choose to restore to an earlier version. The document can also be saved in a local computer by downloading in formats like PDF, Microsoft Word and HTML.

Source: http://iteach.uaf.edu/files/2012/03/GoogleDocCollab.png

The interface is simple-to-use with no installation required. It is effective and efficient for collaboration purposes as it supports concurrent editing capabilities, usage by multiple editors and auto-updates without conflicts. It shows members who are online and allows messaging within the tool. However, the output files do not retain the same formatting as prescribed during development in the Google Docs. The text editor does not natively support advanced editing features like in Microsoft Word and other elements like formulae and graphics (Stijn and Watson, 2008). Also, there is no site map feature to show a collection of all pages that are hyper linked to the document edited by the user. PBWorks

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PBWorks was founded by David Weekly, Nathan Schmidt and Ramit Sethi in 2005. The basic package is free with limited features, customization, and support. It offers 2GB of storage, allows collaboration up to 100 users, and provides no backups. It provides options for public and private sites. The other features include point and click editing, WYSIWYG editor, user support forum, RSS alerts, built-in search capabilities, revision history, three premade templates for free users and unlimited customization for premium users. Tagging can be used to search pages and specific information.

Source: http://pbworksweb8.pbworks.com/f/standalone256.png

Wikis developed for educational receive an ad-free website. The wiki administrator has ultimate control to determine the user roles and set up passwords. The administrator can opt for email notification for any changes to the wiki, delete or change pages and disable passwords for moderators, contributors, and readers. Plugins are available for uploading video, voice, photos, and other content. Storage allocations fill up quickly in the free package due to files containing videos, or other media content. The free package will not be adequate for long-term use and upgrading will be necessary. It also does not offer page or site statistics. My Recommendation - I recommend Google Docs for basic group projects, class presentations, and simple problem solving due to its limited features and text-editor-like functions. PBWorks

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can be used for projects that require teacher control, collaboration with many participants, website-like formats and content organization by tagging. Wiki Selection Criteria - The following criteria will be useful when selecting a wiki for educational use (Schwartz, 2004). Cost: Is it open source software? Will there be license fees (scaled per user)? Complexity: Is online support available? Is it web-hosted? Is it easy to install? Control: Does it require user registration? Is there password protection feature for core pages? Are there levels of user rights to edit? Does it show participants who are online? Is it easy to restore damaged or deleted pages? Clarity: Is there an index map? Does it facilitate linking content between different wikis, and back-linking? Does it include functionalities like page hierarchy, revision tracking, archiving, page creation and deletion, and subscription by email for new content and page changes? Common Technical Framework: Can the wiki be edited in major browsers? Does it support cross-platform? Will there be simultaneous editing conflicts? Features: Does it include features like WYSIWYG editing, text editing, page edit locking, image insertion, hyperlink insertion, tables, lists, media insertion, search, spell-check, emoticons, blogging, polling, calendar, RSS, link checking, drawing tools, equation editor, and synchronous messaging? VI. PEDAGOGIES

Social Constructivist/ Collaborative Learning According to Su and Beaumont (2010), "Wikis represent a technology which can potentially provide an environment that embodies social-constructivist principles since groups of learners can create, revise and insert comments in

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a single article in a simple manner where the result is immediately obvious " (p. 417). There is no clear distinction between the reader and the writer as both are encouraged to construct knowledge through reading, editing, and tagging content for meaningful learning, and participate collaboratively in the knowledge creation (Caverly and Ward, 2008, p. 36). In this collective knowledge sharing is also embedded collaborative bias as the truth of knowledge and combined perspectives are relative to the group. Wikis, therefore, allow the 'wisdom of crowd' to shape the learners knowledge (Educause, 2005). Online Authority Although teachers supervise to steer the interactions in the right direction and monitor activities to prevent complications posed by multiple controls, the notable shift in authority from teachers to students makes the latter to feel more empowered when responding to their peers and teachers. They actively participate in learning due to the increased responsibility gained from maintaining their own collaborative spaces (Lundin, 2008, p. 443). VII. USERS

Wiki creates a virtual collaborative environment through implementing in a variety of creative contexts. It is used by students in schools to engage in deeper learning and adults in the real world to be part of virtual community of practice. For instance, K-12 and university-level students use wikis to collaborate on course projects such as sharing dialogue and information with each other; and adult users like scientists and engineers contribute to wikis 'on the fly' such as sharing or commenting on product details or research data (Educause, 2005). VIII. INTEGRATION INTO CURRICULUM

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STOLEN Principle - Dave Foord created the acronym, STOLEN, to describe the best practices for implementing educational wiki and seeking better learning results. S - Specific Overall Objective - Assign a clear objective and not a general area for the wiki that should be understood by all; provide grading strategy and rubrics T - Timely - Specify definitive times for different stages of use and end point O - Ownership - Ensure that people feel that they collaboratively own the wiki L - Localized objective - Provide structure of what is expected and starting points for editing E - Engagement rules - Set permissions for who can edit and which parts they can edit. Develop conventions that indicate acceptable and unacceptable use N - Navigation - Set clear navigation structure and keep the navigation simple Instructional Applications of Wikis Phillipsons five "stages of inquiry" for wikis include resource wiki, presentation wiki, gateway wiki, simulation wiki and illuminated wiki (Caverly and Ward, 2008, p. 37). Resource wiki is a knowledge form that promotes the development of knowledge building communities as it grows over several classes. For example, the students develop a class journal that serves as an ongoing documentation of their learning in class and projects. Presentation wiki is a communication form in order to share the learners understanding of concepts to construct individual projects. For example, the students create a class website that also has links to web pages of individual students. They contribute to the development of the website by brainstorming ideas in wikis.

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Gateway wiki is a data sharing form in which learners discuss the evidences to analyze the data and solve the problem. For example, the teacher posts a lab experiment data on wiki and includes several questions that need to be answered following the learners collective analysis of the data. Simulation wiki provides a problem in a simulated environment for which the learners coconstruct solutions and justify their decision points. For example, the teacher presents an existing environmental situation with problems relevant to their learning. The situation requires the learners to provide the best possible solution. Illuminated wiki is the explication of text form in which the learners divide and construct knowledge about their understanding of the learning. For example, the teacher presents a descriptive biology concept to each learning group. The learners divide the concept and construct the steps to illuminate it using print, images, video, and other media. IX. USE IN MY INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

My online course will be intended for adult learners pursuing graduate programs in the field of education. By the end of the project, the learners will able to a) evaluate the benefits and challenges of using Web 2.0 technologies for teaching and learning, and b) devise effective methods of incorporating specific Web 2.0 tools in their respective educational and training environment. In order to increase learner-learner interaction in the graduate level online course, Web 2.0 for Educators, Google Docs will be used for an ongoing course project. The group members will have access to edit the document, while the instructor and other group members will only view and add comments. The instructor will go through the editing history to ensure that all group members contribute to the project work. The project will weigh 25% of the final grade. Three groups of five students will be formed based on their interests in teaching in K-12

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settings, teaching in higher education settings, and training in organizations. The learning groups will function as knowledge building communities throughout the course duration. Each group will find a scholarly article on the Web 2.0 technology discussed in the weekly lecture. The subject of the article will align with the groups teaching interest. The learners will independently read and collaboratively write a review (in less than 500 words) on the weeks chosen article by addressing the following questions. 1. How was the Web 2.0 tool applied to conduct the research study as described in the Methods section of the paper? 2. Was the tool implemented effectively in the context of research methods? Give reasons. 3. What are some benefits and challenges of using the tool in education or training, which can be identified from the paper? Each group member will dedicate a page to brainstorm ideas to develop a lesson plan (in less than 300 words) for implementing the tool in a common teaching situation, related to the groups teaching interest. They will also comment on the work of another group by using the peerevaluation rubric provided by the instructor. These comments will point areas for improvement and suggest ideas for revision. X. CONCLUSION

To sum it up, wiki has a great user-centered design that can effectively support the learning process through social interaction and collaborative knowledge building. This web 2.0 application in education is best used in conjunction with good teaching and authentic projects that involve the students to work at the conceptual level for problem solving, identifying patterns, understanding relationships and interacting meaningfully with the content.

Divya Madhavan XI. REFERENCES

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Lamb, Brian (2004). Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not. EDUCAUSE Review, 39(5), 3648. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/wide-open-spaces-wikis-readyor-not Educause (2005, July). 7 things you should know about? Wikis. Retrieved from http://edccarleton.pbworks.com/f/7+Things+you+Should+Know+about+Wikis++Educause.pdf Botterbusch, Hope R. and Parker, Preston (2008). Copyright and Collaborative Spaces: Open Licensing and Wikis. TechTrends, 52(1), 7-9. Retrieved from

http://edrd651.pbworks.com/f/Copyright%2Band%2BCollaborative%2BSpaces%2BOpe n%2BLicensing%2Band%2BWikis.pdf Lundin, Rebecca Wilson (2008). Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy. Computers and Composition, 25(4), 432-448. Retrieved from

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8755461508000637 PBwiki (or PBworks) - Wiki Site Evaluation Report. (n.d.). Retrieved December 11, 2013, from http://wikieval652.wikidot.com/pbwiki Schwartz, Linda et al. (2004). Educational Wikis: features and selection criteria. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 5(1). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/163/244 University of Delaware (2008, May 23). Wikis in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.udel.edu/sakai/training/printable/wiki/Wikis_in_Higher_Education_UD.pdf

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Huang, Wen-Hao David (2010). A Case Study of Wikis? Effects on Online Transactional Interactions. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 6(1), 1-14. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no1/huang_0310.pdf Peter Jones (2010). Collaboration at a Distance: Using a Wiki to Create a Collaborative Learning Environment for Distance Education and On-Campus Students in a Social Work Course. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 30:2, 225-236, DOI: 10.1080/08841231003705396. Caverly, David C., and Anne Ward (2008). Techtalk: Wikis and Collaborative Knowledge Construction. Journal of Developmental Education, 32:2, 36-7. ProQuest. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. Duffy, Peter and Bruns, Axel (2006). The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities. In Proceedings Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, Brisbane, pp. 31-38. Feng Su & Chris Beaumont (2010). Evaluating the use of a wiki for collaborative learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 47:4, 417-431, DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2010.518428 Qian, Y. (2007). Meaningful Learning with Wikis: Making a Connection. In R. Carlsen et al. (Eds.). Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2007, pp. 2093-2097. Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved December 10, 2013 from http://www.editlib.org/p/24893.

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Schroeder, B. (2009). Within the Wiki: Best Practices for Educators. AACE Journal, 17(3), 181197. Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved December 11, 2013 from

http://www.editlib.org/p/28183. Dekeyser, Stijn, and Richard Watson (2008). Extending google docs to collaborate on research papers. Toowoomba, Queensland, AU: The University of Southern Queensland, Australia 23 2006. Anderson, P. (2012). Web 2.0 and beyond: Principles and technologies (Vol. 7). CRC Press.