The Gateway Wiki
August 11, 2008
The gateway wiki connects a data set to the typical wiki features that enable participants to share experiences and pose questions.
The data could reside in a census database, come from a collection of research journals, or be a report on a scientific experiment. It could consist of scientific measurements, statistics, calculations, or survey results. The database is linked to the wiki which is used by students for pedagogical activities. The students can produce individual or group pages demonstrating a critical analysis of the data. The instructor can also use the wiki to provide information which introduces the data, explains concepts, or illustrates and supplements the data.
This type of wiki could be very effective for science lab sections where students might want to log results, share experience, pose questions, and have access to theory, as well as data. Students in science courses or other environments where collaboration has not been encouraged may need to be encouraged to develop the full benefits of social software.
EXAMPLES
Genetics And Molecular Biology
What Wiki?
August 8, 2008
A wiki is a web page which users can change.
The idea of wiki originated in 1995 when Ward Cunningham realized that posting notes to a listserv (essentially a thread of emails) made it difficult to connect new postings to older ones at the bottom of the list. He envisioned contribuors being able to edit a common document with an archiving of all changes so that a permanent record of the document’s history would exist. The result was the WikiWikiWeb project.
The word Wiki is Hawaiian and comes from the name of a shuttle bus at the Honolulu airport. Wik wiki means “quickly”.
- Photo by Arik Baratz
For educators an understanding of the wiki and its applications have been overshadowed by Wikipedia. As Mark Phillipson1 points out there are different types of wiki as well as corresponding software choices and so Wikipedia may not be the best example to consider.
Phillipson suggests that most teachers are looking for specific examples of wiki-enabled activities for the classroom. In his article he offers a taxonomy of wiki types with examples of their application in teaching.
The five wiki types are:
