Wikis

Wikipedia is amazing but why is it so hard to have success with other wiki sites. The world is rapidly moving to creation through collaboration yet the education community seems to be stalled. What is needed to give3 it a kick start?

REFLECTIONS ON LEARNING

Every one has heard of a wiki, right. I certainly thought I knew quite a lot about them. Wikipedia is my first source of all information on the web. I use other wikis at work. I thought that I had a good understanding before heading into this weeks work with Wikis. It turns out that there was a lot for me to learn.

As with most weeks, my learning started by going through the wiki trailfire for this course. I am becoming a big fan of the common craft videos that are embedded in the trailfire. They are a great starting place because they provide a simple yet detailed explanation of the topics. I found this video on wikis to be particularly useful in learning about wikis.

My learning then also turned to another familiar and reliable source. I read Chapter 8 “Wikis: The Death of the Author” from Davies and Merchant (2009) as well as Richardson’s (2009) Chapter 4 “Wikis Easy Collaboration for all”. These two resources provided me with the background knowledge to go move forward and explore aspects of wikis on the web that I had not jumped into before.

My first stop was a closer look at Wikipedia. I have used this source many times and have come to trust its content but I guess I have just taken it for granted. I recall the grave concerns about accuracy of information from this source early on in its development. I must say that I have not heard much about that lately and I think people are starting to feel more and more comfortable using it as a some of information like an encyclopedia. As our children grow up using this it will become more and more acceptable and will replace traditional sources of information altogether (my humble prediction).

The first section of Davies and Merchant (2009) chapter 4 discusses the traditional sources of information such as encyclopedias. They were respected because of the expertise of the author but what was provided for in expertise was lacking in up to date information. Although wikis do not guarantee any expertise the information can be updated constantly and accuracy can be challenged continually by a group of experts the world over. To me this will create a much more valuable source of knowledge that is up to date. And if it is not then you have the ability to update it!!

I have used Wikipedia a lot over the years but have never edited or contributed anything to it myself. I thought that to learn about wikis I should actually try this. I thought that I would add a part to Wikipedia’s article on Swift Current add to that the fact that we are about to host the 2010 World Women’s Curling Championships as the current article has no mention of that. I do not have an account so I thought that I would create one and then do this editing. When I tried this from my office I was not allowed to create a new account or do any of the editing because my IP address was blocked. The following message appeared:

“Account creation from this IP address has been temporarily restricted. This is probably due to persistent vandalism from the IP address you are editing from, which may be shared by many people if you are connected to the Internet via a proxy server (used by most schools and corporations and some Internet service providers) “

I did not get a chance to do the editing but will try to do that later when I can try from a different IP Address. By doing this I did learn however that editing is not as open as critics might expect. There is obviously some attention paid to who is editing and blocking of sites does occur. I also think that vandalism is not as big an issue as it might be because many people are uncertain and uneasy in making changes. I wonder what percentage of Wikipedia users ever try to make changes to its content?

My next learning took me to the other side of wikis. Where Wikipedia is tremendously successful my experience with more local wikis has been consistently the opposite. We have tried to use wikis in our school division and I have been invited to join a few wikis as well. Within the Chinook School division our e-learning team has created wikis and templates to support teachers within the division and to foster collaboration across our vastly spread out geographically challenged school division. This would seem like the ideal setting for a wiki to take hold and flourish yet it has not. Most of the contribution to this wiki has been by our e-learning teachers as they set this up. The site is called Chinoowiki and is a wiki that is housed inside of our school division portal. Teachers have been provided with in-service on how to use it but it just doesn’t seem to move forward. I have been involved in creating parts of it and must admit that even with that level of commitment I do not utilize it very much personally either.

My learning then took me to exploring some of the wikis that we have access to provincially. I am a member of Wikispaces and have been for a while. I took some time to explore the features that I had access to and found that it is similar in many respects to a lot of the other social networking memberships I have signed onto this winter. Although I have been a member I never even knew that there was a home page for members where they could control and see the wikis that they are members for. In my exploration I realized that I was a member of the Saskconsultants wiki but had never used the resource. This was a resource that was set up by a division coordinator in Saskatchewan to allow us to communicate and share information with each other across the province. Again we are spread out and it is difficult to get together so this would be a logical way of doing this. Again I found that it is very unsuccessful. There is only one contributor to the site thus far.

A similar wiki that I had been asked to join is https://sasklearningleaders.wikispaces.com/.

This site has provincial information that is useful to all divisions. Again When I explored it a bit I found good information but a lack of participation and thus the site is limited.

A final piece of my learning journey regarding wikis came about due to my attendance of the ASCD conference. One of the speakers I listened to at the conference was Don Tapscot. His topic was a discussion about the net generation. A quick internet search has found his web page http://dontapscott.com/ and he referred to two books that I plan to read as they sound fascinating. One of these is “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” and the other is titled “Grown up Digital” During his speech he talked about how things are changing and mentioned that California has launched an initiative to have all of their textbooks created using wikis. Is this the direction that we are heading???

PERSONAL LEARNINGS

The use of Wikis in my personal life at this point is restricted to Wikipedia. Although that sounds small it is quite significant. I use Wikipedia with as much confidence as I have ever used encyclopedias, dictionaries or other traditional sources of knowledge. This is the starting point for learning about new things with my family. When working with my daughter, helping her with homework etcetera we often start with a visit to Wikipedia. She has grown up with this as a resource and I do not think that she even has a clue about how it is created, who creates it and whether it is authentic information. I plan on having a discussion with her to make her aware of this and although we have not added anything to this resource yet we may do so to illustrate to her that the people adding to it may not be the experts that she thinks.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

As my introduction suggested I have seen two very different sides to wikis. The idea of collaborating with large groups of people to create web content has been extremely successful with sites such as Wikipedia. At the local level however there are roadblocks to this success. We often have a lot of efforts put into the initial setup of a wiki but interest quickly trails off and since nothing new is added by anyone then people eventually stop visiting the site altogether. This is a challenge that we must overcome if we are to tap the full potential of the wiki as Wikipedia has.

We have great potential for sharing information with colleagues in our province and across Canada for that matter. As mentioned earlier in my blog, we have a wiki called Saskconsultants that was set up to allow school division consultants to share and pool ideas across the school division. We also have another wiki set up by the provincial ministry called Sask Learning Leaders. This wiki has provincial information including:

1. Articles that Rock Your World
2. Assessment
3. Curriculum Documents
4. Curriculum Reports
5. Early Learning
6. English Language Arts
7. First Nations, Inuit and Metis Content, Perspectives and Ways of Knowing
8. Instructional Strategies
9. Literature Reviews
10. Mathematics
11. Policies and Administrative Procedures
12. Science
13. Unpacking Outcomes

Another valuable use of the wiki is for planning events such as conferences. This can be especially useful when the members are spread over a large area. The recent ASCD conference that I attended used a wiki to help plan the conference allowing individuals from around the world to contribute to the planning of this very large conference. We could certainly utilize this on a smaller division or provincial scale for similar planning.

Perhaps one of the best uses of wikis for me to date has been by simply reading about and viewing other wikis. I get the Wikispaces Newsletter emailed to me (I think it is monthly). The newsletter for January 2010 highlighted 3 of the Best Educational Wikis-of-2009. Check these out

Greeting From the World

Arjana Blazic’s wiki bridges different cultures and continents by allowing educators and students to share their stories and cultures with others. Using tools like Glogster, students from around the world interact with their peers through images, videos, and text.

Soar 2 New Heights

Katie Heissenbuttel created this wiki for her fourth grade classroom. Over the past year, Katie has enjoyed watching her students’ discussions develop. Initially, students only answered Katie’s questions on the wiki but they soon began to comment and respond to their peers’ postings.

As you visit the wiki, you’ll find student podcasts covering recent news events and individual pages showcasing each student’s work. Katie’s students are always excited to share their latest projects with their parents and parents really love the page of upcoming homework assignments. It’s a great example of how a wiki can transform learning into a community process

HUMS3001: Censorship and Responsibility

Ben Miller, a teacher at the University of New South Wales, wanted his students to build learning materials for his course. He decided a wiki was the best platform to capture the group’s work over the semester. Ben chose to create his wiki on UNSW’s Wikispaces Private Label siteas it gave his students a university-branded environment for their academic work.

Students loved the wiki and after several weeks, were building most of the content for the site – summarizing theories on free speech, arguing their viewpoints, and highlighting censorship cases that they wanted to further explore. The final product was a rich body of knowledge that helped the students prepare for their end-of-year exam.

References:

Davies, J & Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for schools learning and social participation, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

De Groot, J. (2010). Trailfire: Wikis. http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/trailview/61579

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. 2nded. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

http://blog.wikispaces.com/2010/01/best-educational-wikis-of-2009.html