Wikis: Environments for online collaboration
The controversial news headlines plaguing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tends to cloud one’s understanding of what the term “wiki” means. Contrary to the misconceptions, also parlayed by the 10-year popularity of Wikipedia, wikis are not inherently sources of questionable content, whistle blower concerns, or virtual dictionaries. Rather, when technically understood, wikis can serve as collaborative environments of instructional and learning benefits for educators, students, and colleges and universities.
What is a wiki?
According to the open community of authors at Wikipedia itself, the Hawaiian word for hurry or fast, “wiki-wiki,” a “wiki” is a website typically operated by wiki software that allows anyone to create and edit “interlinked web pages via a web browser.” This means anyone can add and edit content as long as the page is not protected.The American computer programmer Ward Cunningham developed the wiki and wiki software in 1994 as a means for software programmers to communicate and collaborate. Wikis have since evolved into a technological means for group collaboration by allowing a specific wiki’s users to control and edit content.
Where do you set up a wiki?
The very essence of a wiki is collaboration so marketing is geared toward including everyone, and mostly for free. Wikispaces is a popular free website among educators, who can sign up for basic wikis that allow unlimited members, discussion forums and student accounts. The wikis offered by this site also features the ability for educators to embed media, edit, customize the wiki displays and make the wiki’s content available to only its members. K-12 educators enjoy an upgraded free wiki package that typically costs $50 through this site.
Using a wiki for educational collaboration
Many wiki sites are geared toward younger students as a way for subject teachers to collaborate with students. For example, a math teacher may use a wiki to show and engage students in a complicated algebra equation. However, high education institutions can equally take advantage of wikis by having students engage in various ways, including collaborative writing projects, doctoral research, team learning and peer reviews. Faculty also benefit from the collaborative wiki, allowing professors to share learning tools, agendas and hold departmental meetings or workshops via embedded media, such as postings.
Zoho® wikis, available for free or a fee based on the number of users, further suggests that faculty can use wikis to collaboratively write course curriculum. The site, as stated in the excerpt below, also states that wikis can be used for research as follows:
- Establishing and managing study groups and mentor matching
- Building intranet sites and posting opportunities to participate in a research group
- Hosting research materials for researchers who could not make it to one of the instruction sessions
Overcoming implementation barriers
Although the lack of extensive computer knowledge makes wikis easy to use, the study,"Wiki uses in higher education: exploring barriers to successful implementation," published online in August 2010, indicates educators may encounter student resistance to wiki use as part of the curriculum. Student engagement in the wiki, or study station, is difficult due to a general lack of acceptance because they are used to traditional curriculum methods, the study finds. Some students also do not like the collaborative writing process or feel they could produce better coursework if done alone. Other students also find collaborative editing complex or, perhaps more importantly, fail to appreciate the collaborative process because they only read the content pages that they edit thereby losing the point of the medium. Some students also reject changes made by other students, the study also shows.
“The success of any wiki implementation in higher education might be undermined if we fail to take into consideration (1) what the wiki task demands of the students and (b) students’ perspective about the usefulness of the wiki for their learning,” the study states.
Educators, the study suggests, may best keep in mind that wikis are there to supplement—as opposed to replace—traditional curriculum in order for students to accept the technology and receive its full collaborative benefits.
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