The Illuminated Wiki
August 12, 2008
The illuminated wiki is used to engage learners in a process of explication often accomplished through the collaborative markup of source documents.
In this process individual students can choose words or phrases from the source text, a poem for example, and explain or elaborate on its significance. While individual contributions can be monitored by the instructor the class can share in the overall elaboration of the text.
Illuminated wikis are thus illuminated by the students and work can be compared across classes or over several semesters.
EXAMPLES
Creative and Collaborative Writing
The Simulation Wiki
August 12, 2008
The simulation wiki lends itself to activities such as creative writing projects and the study of historical events. It is generally a simulation of a selected time and place, usually involving multiple actors. The participants make choices and exprerience consequences as a single actor often interacting with other participants in their simulation roles.
Simulations usually require actors to confront a series of key decisions, crises involving with important choices to be made, and often intresecting with other groups.
In one example students collaborate in the writing of a Greek tragedy during which they identify dominant myths, build outlines, submit progress reports, drafts, and reflections on their finished work.
EXAMPLE
The Presentation Wiki
August 12, 2008
The presentation wiki could also be called the course management wiki because, even though it doesn’t have all the capabilities of most CMS’s, it is often used by instructors for the presentation of course material to students. As such the presentation wiki has an inward focus, used primarily for the convenience of the class.
This type of wiki can offer practical experience in the use of a communication forum and support a class in accessing, organizing, and manipulating information effectively. When students contribute to the wiki the focus is on the process of assembling information. The wiki can support brainstorming, project collaboration, information literacy, resource structuring, and peer evaluation. Often students work in class to organize findings on the wiki and then present them.
The presentation wiki has often been used in composition and writing classes or in rhetoric courses where it can help students focus on the right mix of words, images, sounds, and feelings.
This type of wiki also lends itself to teacher training where it can provide instructors with a workspace in which to do exercises in course and lesson planning.
Because of the experimental nature of much of the work on the presentation wiki it may be a good idea to restrict access to members of the class.
Teaching English Language Arts
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:
Why Wiki?
August 7, 2008
In his article entitled Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, American law professor, Yochai Benkler1 identifies a new form of production callled “commons-based peer-production” which he claims has important advantages over other prduction methods where what is being produced is information or culture and where computers and communication capabilities are widely distributed, not concentrated.
He cites the development of open source software as a case in point and the creation of the Linux operating system as the premier example. Under this model thousands of programmers contribute to the development of a software project which is free of the usual copying and use restrictions associated with proprietary material. The difference is clearly seen in contrasting Linux with Microsoft’s Windows, for example.
No one owns the open source software in terms of controlling how it develops or where it might be used. Benkler elaborates at length on the efficiencies and effectiveness of this collaborative production process when producing information and cultural material. Dr. Robert Cummings of Columbus State University argues that the Wiki is an important educational tool because it employs this new production model.
It is likely that we do students a favor when we introduce them to a way of building knowledge which is increasingly used in the mainstream economy around them.
While some educators wonder whether to choose a blog instead of a wiki, Cummings points out that the wiki has several pedagogcal advantages. First, the teacher ceases to be the target audience of the student work and is replaced with ”a reasonable imaginary audience” which often writes back.
Secondly, student authors are asked to judge their content in terms of the needs of the project, not in terms of the needs of the teacher or other authority.
In addition, the wiki offers maximum flexibility for the creativity of the student and because the project, by its nature, is collaborative, each student must may see the where her work should be connected (linked) to other parts of the project.
Finally, the student sees his work is valuable, that his words count. Furthermore, the sharing of his work with others creates a subtle pressure to excellence based on peer expectations.
1Benkler, Yochai. “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” 112 Yalle Law Journal 369 (2002): 369-447
