Using wikis in the classroom

I had a brilliant failure using wiki in the classroom. I had some hopeful ideas about the potential of collaborative document editing in a group-learning situation. Visions of ‘negotiating meaning’, ‘knowledge construction’ and ‘student-to-student interaction’ swam through my head. I wanted to share with the participants my experience of collaborating in a wiki environment, and how it feels to have someone else edit your document, how you see a concept from someone else’s mind map. From my experience, in addition to my research, I believe that learning is inherently social, and any tools that can promote this will be the most effective. But finally, I ended up using wiki as pumped-up PowerPoint. It turns out I changed the tool, but did not change the practice. It was WikiLite. ...

My mode of conducting the class was, to a large extent, the limiting factor in how people engaged with the wiki. Yet I still wonder if, for our purposes, I was required to conduct those classes in that manner due to the subject matter and time restraints, especially because participants had little time outside of classroom hours to contribute or participate in any extra tasks? No answers, only questions … Perhaps time and access are important factors that cannot be overlooked.

An experienced wiki developer told me that people come to him from "academia" and wanted to know questions such as: "how can I use this in my classroom". What they don’t realize is that there is a great potential in this tool to be completely disruptive (in a good way) to the classroom setting. At this point, I made a connection to an article by Scardamalia and Bereiter about ‘Computer Support for Knowledge Building Communities’ which called for no less than restructuring our concept of ‘schools’ to allow for student to student interaction, negotiating meaning, and knowledge construction.

I used an instructionist and fill-in-the-blanks approach, whereas, what I would have rather have done is for the student to identify the blanks themselves, and build from there. In other words, it's as if I had installed a blog, but only for myself to publish to the class, and allowed them to only make comments. To really use blog to it's fullest potential, the participants need to be writing their own posts and making comments on each other's pages. To really use a wiki, the participants need to be in control of the content — you have to give it over fully. ...

It seems clear to me now that you cannot just change the tool — you need to look at your practice as well. Being so open, a wiki does not have any inherent properties that will instantly make a knowledge-building community. It depends not only on the software configuration — for example whether certain areas are locked or whether you make templates for layout — but also on the social norms and practices around the wiki. In a classroom setting, this means the practice of the teacher, and the interactions of the students.

Models being explored at MeatballWiki and CommunityWiki are particularly applicable. There they are developing a language to describe the importance of group interaction around collaborative document creation.

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