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Block 2: Activity Task 2

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Edited by Elena Kondyli, Saturday, 10 Apr 2010, 22:45

What is a wiki?

Wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor (Wikipedia, 2010a).

  1. An analysis of the social values wiki users adopt

Wiki users adopt the constructivist learning which is learning through activity, creation of knowledge and sharing of knowledge.  Additionally, the openess of wikis, leads the users to trust what peers are saying and obviously through sharing of their knowledge they have a trend to correct peer's mistakes.  The users are now working in an online community in a sense of a group and participate in online discussions in order to improve the existing entries or add new ones. All the users are working together with a strong sense of common purpose in student learning (Ferris and Wilder, 2006).

Furthermore, users collaborate with each other in order to edit, write and then save a story etc, insert links and finally issues of ownership and authorship can be raised.  There is also the need for the users to ask themselves how the information is organised and think about all the progressive changes of new technologies (Ferris and Wilder, 2006).  The Educause Learning Initiative-advancing learning through IT innovation (2005) suggests that users are using wikis in a democratic way and also wikis promote pride of authorship and ownership in a group activity.  There is a real-time interactivity and this helps users to collaborate at the same time, on the same moment to fix the postings, editings, writings and finally decide on the most appropriate content to be published. As users are socialising through wikis as they are sharing ideas, then the innovation capacity increases from wiki infrastructure (Gordon, 2006).

 

  1. A discussion regarding the relationship between these social values and the features of the wiki technology itself

As wikis are collaborative Web-based sites with "open editing", the users are able to read, edit or change the text by simply having a Web-browser in order to re-write, re-construct, re-organise not only the structure, but also the content of the site.  The technology of the wikis is completely associated with the social values and both are effectively interrelated (Ferris and Wilder, 2006).  As Weller (2006) suggests in his article, technology limits the effectiveness of the social values of users who in return have to be willing to engage not only with the content but with the technology too.  Someone might say that people are feeling insecure and scared to use the technology and publish different postings in public manner in the Web.  However, I do not agree with these opinions as users already know how to use the technology and wiki technology is an easy one with easy functions and anyone can use it.  They do not need tremendous training or something but just a Web browser in order to be able as I have mentioned above to read, edit/add text and then save it and it would be a web page at the end.  The technology of the wikis is simple and user-friendly that is why users sometimes do not trust the resources or they do not feel that for example Wikipedia as a reliable resource for students to use.  Additionally, as wiki is an open source, then it is easier for anyone to publish inaccurate or unfaithful information and this leads to misleading information.  But, users have to have the ability to distinguish between the correct information and the misleading one as they are making their own judgements regarding the accuracy of the information (Ferris and Wilder, 2006).  Moreover, the Educause Learning Initiative-advancing learning through IT innovation (2005) comments that there is the fear for inappropriate content and language, spam and these are some features that in order to be monitored have to have time and personnel intensive.  By representing the collective prospective of the group that uses the wiki then the wiki has a collaborative bias.

In conclusion, wikis are an excellent starting place from which to create social networks and seeding future opportunities for learning and growth (Gordon, 2006).             .

(684 words)

References:

Ferris, S. P. and Wilder, H. (2006) Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom [online], http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol2_issue5/Uses_and_Potentials_of_Wikis_in_the_Classroom.pdf(accessed 09 April 2010).

Gordon, C. (2006) Wikis-a disruptive innovation [online],http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=15802 (accessed 09 April 2010).

The Educause Learning Initiative-advancing learning through IT innovation (2005) 7 things you should know about...wikis [online], http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7004.pdf (accessed 09 April 2010).

Weller, M. (2006) 'The distance from isolation: why communities are the logical conclusion in e-learning' (accessed 09 April 2010).

Wikipedia (2010a) Wikipedia definition for Wiki [online], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#cite_note-3 (accessed 09 April 2010).

 

 

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CA 10.1 Putting knowledge into practice

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Edited by Elena Kondyli, Thursday, 18 Feb 2010, 13:04

Learning and Teaching Committee report

 

By Elena Kondyli/11.01.2010

Executive summary

This report is aiming to the use of wikis within a higher education institute, whether it should adopt an institution-wide policy to wikis and if so, what the policy should be and what the potential issues are.  The main findings of this report are:

 

Wikis are pedagogical applications in education supporting writing instruction

Wikis invigorate writing

Wikis provide a low cost but effective communication and collaboration tool

Wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts

Wikis discourage "product oriented writing" while facilitating "writing as a process"

Wikis ease students into writing for public consumption

Wikis are invaluable for teaching the rhetoric of emergent technologies

Background

According to Charles Mingus "making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity".  In practice the term wiki is applied to a diverse set of systems, features, approaches, and projects (Lamb, 2004).  There are arguments on what constitutes true wikiness.  Some fundamental principals apply like anyone can change anything since they are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined.  Also, wikis use simplified hypertext markup as wikis have their own markup language that essentially strips HTML down to its simplest elements.  Furthermore, wikipage titles are mashed together, often eschew spaces to allow for quick page creation and automatic, mark-up free links between pages within wiki systems.  Finally, the content is ego-less, time-less and never finished, anonymity is not required but it is common.  There are multiple contributors and notions of page authorship and ownership which can be radically change.  Wiki pages are organized by contexts, by links in and links out, and by various categories or concepts emerging in the authoring process.  They are constantly in a state of flux and the entries are often unpolished with gaps left on purpose by the creators, hoping that someone else will fit in and fill in the gaps left behind deliberately.

Current practice

According to Henrik Ibsen "a community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm".  The University of British Columbia is using a number of varied applications, like the Faculty of Applied Science Instructional Support which links wikis into its course management system authoring environment so that designs teams can quickly collaborate to build reference lists and outlines, brainstorming instructional strategies and capture suggestions.  Another example, the Romantic Audience Project at Bowdoin College is a collaborative study collecting entries focusing on poems, poets and topics related to Romantic literature.  The students chose the wiki framework.  Another example comes from the professor Joe Moxley, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, who lists a number of medium's strengths for the teaching of writing skills such as "fun" and "wiki" are often associated.  Low cost, effective collaboration and collaboration tool are some of the basic characteristics that a wiki is characterized.

Recommendation

In many respects, wikis contrasts vividly with the traditional approaches of standard groupware and collaborative systems.  Access restrictions, rigidly defined workflows, and structures are anathema to most wiki developers.  One unique characteristic of the wikis is that users define for themselves how their processes and groups will develop, usually by making things up as they go along.  In addition, wikis work great as shared online sketchpads or as spaces for brainstorming.  They are also, excellent for creating perpetually updated lists or collections of links and most users can instantly grasp their utility as informal bulletin boards. One way to use wiki is for a meeting planning where a provisional agenda can be drawn, then the URL is distributed to the participants, who in turn are free to communicate with each other, comment or add their own items.  Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda becomes a note-taking template and when finally the meeting is completed, the notes will be available online, allowing again the participants or anyone else to review or annotate the proceedings.

Issues

There is lack of hard security and privacy and a typical absence of an explicit organizing structure.  In addition, it is easy to recognize a wiki page from a mile away since all the pages more or less are alike.  They lack of colors, aesthetic appeal and they are plain.  Moreover, tracking work in a wiki page may become a logistical nightmare and the management control can easily spin out and as a result a set of protocols to regulate or index them is needed.  Another policy issue that threatens to complicate the widespread adoption of wikis in higher education is the specification of intellectual property (IP) rights by contributors to a wiki page.  Also, as users apply wikis more commonly in their practice, they increasingly come to depend on them.  There is no unified set of software characteristics that are shared by all wikis.

Further reading

 

Ferris, S. and Wilder, H. (2006) 'Uses and potentials of wikis in the classroom', Innovate, vol. 2, no. 5. Available from: http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol2_issue5/ (accessed 11 January 2010).

 

Lamb, B. (2004) 'Wide open space: wikis, ready or not', Educause Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October), pp. 36-48. Available from: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp (accessed 11 January 2010).

 

References:

Lamb, B. (2004) 'Wide open space: wikis, ready or not', Educause Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October), pp. 36-48. Available from: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

P.S. Very difficult activity for me.  I do not even know if the requirements of this activity are fulfilled with this report.

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