Wiki uses in teaching and learning

ABSTRACT

Faculty from five universities will discuss their groups' respective teaching and learning wikis. The group assembled here represents several divergent approaches and projects to harnessing the collaborative and open-source nature of Wikis to the tasks of teaching, educating inquiry and training.We will discuss and compare Wiki projects that cover diverse methods and content fields. Projects include secondary, undergraduate, and graduate level courses. Systems we describe address groups varying in size from roughly a dozen to hundreds of students. We approach the ontology and pedagogy of Wiki-based educational materials drawing on cognitive and social constructivism, a theory of inquiry-based learning, and an interest in information markets and online sharing dynamics. Projects included in this panel have received financial support from a variety of granting agencies, including the Israeli Internet Association, U.S. National Science Foundation, the GVU Center at Georgia Institute of Technology, SHOHAM at The Open University of Israel, and InfoSoc at the University of Haifa.We created and now study widely different implementations of Wiki usage in education that reflect a variety of instructional approaches. In all of the projects we have completed at least one cycle of use, and can therefore report on outcomes that include user feedback, reactions and satisfaction; impact on learning; impact on grade; non-obtrusive measures of usage patterns; and external measures of quality of the content generated and preserved. Our findings address the issues of design considerations, multilingual and multicultural content, group dynamics, evaluation and quality control. We wish to use this panel to share lessons learned and discuss a variety of usage modes, in search of "best practice" models as well as share lessons learned that apply to future modifications and additions to the code.

INDEX TERMS

General Terms:
Human Factors, Management, Theory