Building a learning community using wikis in educational technology courses
Swapna Kumar Department of Curriculum and Teaching School of Education Boston University USA
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Abstract: Wikis are increasingly being used to enhance and facilitate collaborative learning in higher education. This paper describes the use of a wiki in an educational technology course to build community and collaboration among educators beyond the classroom and course duration. Feedback from participants at the end of the educational technology course highlighted the potential of wikis for encouraging collaboration, sharing, and reflection by teachers about their technology use in educational environments. Quantitative and qualitative data about participant educators’ continued use of the wiki and their sense of community will be collected three months after the end of the course.
Introduction A number of Web 2.0 tools – wikis, blogs, social networking tools like Facebook, and social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us provide educators with increased opportunities to use technology for collaboration and community-building. Unlike older websites where teachers or instructors provided content online for students to view and use, new technologies make it possible for educators to create online space where students can be contributors and creators of content. Such virtual spaces can also be used by students not only during a course but also after it ends. This paper describes how wikis were used in a graduate educational technology course for inservice educators to facilitate community-building and collaboration during the course as well as after it ended. Participants’ qualitative feedback on the ways in which the wiki contributed to building a community among the course participants during the course is reported in this paper. Participants’ contributions to the wiki during and after the course are being tracked and a survey about their sense of community due to wiki use will be administered three months after the end of the course.
Using Wikis in Education A ‘wiki’ has been defined as “a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information – a database, where each page is easily edited by any user with a formscapable Web browser client” (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001, p14). Wikis are easy to use – users can create, add, edit, and change content and pages in a wiki. This has caught the imagination of educators who encourage and implement constructivist and/or collaborative learning with their students. “Even confirmed technophobes have grasped and mastered the system quickly…Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure” (Lamb, 2004, p40). A number of wiki creation tools (e.g. http://www.wetpaint.com, http://www.mediawiki.com; http://www.pbwiki.com) are available online for use by teachers and students free of cost. All wikis contain basic editing functions (e.g. text, images, tables, lists, hyperlinks), tracking functions (saving of modifications), linking functions (links to pages and articles), and search functions (text search of wikis) (Ebersbach, Glaser & Heigl, 2006). The ease of use or the transparency of the interface, the capability of creating hyperlinks, the use of the discussion area for reflection, and the ability to track prior changes are just some features that make wikis attractive to educators (Achtermann, 2006).
When educators use wikis in their classrooms, there can be a “role shift” where teachers have less control and student autonomy is increased (Lamb, 2004, p45). While it is possible to use a wiki as a traditional website and not give students ‘writing’ access, teachers can exploit the capabilities of the tool by giving students ‘write’ or ‘edit’ rights and more control over the wiki content. Some wiki software also provides the administrator with the option of ‘locking’ pages, i.e. not allowing anyone to edit those pages, of protecting certain pages with a password, or of allowing only certain users to edit those pages. These options provide teachers with tremendous flexibility to structure and protect different parts of the wiki differently. Wiki software thus makes it possible for teachers to provide some amount of scaffolding and to facilitate student-student interaction, where students interact with each other to create shared knowledge (Palloff & Pratt, 2005).
Collaborative Learning and Community From the constructivist perspective, “learning is necessarily a social dialogical process in which communities of practitioners socially negotiate the meaning of phenomena” (Jonassen et al., 1995, p9). Vygotsky (1962) asserted that learning occurs through dialogical interaction in two ways - either in the form of reflective thought within one’s self, or as a result of communication with others in a social environment. It follows that learners construct meaning from a personal perspective, and also redefine and reconstruct knowledge collaboratively with other learners. Especially in graduate education settings where students bring some level of prior experience of both their practice and learning to the educational experience, the collaborative construction of knowledge and reflection on existing knowledge can be leveraged by the instructor using a virtual environment. Although learning communities can be fostered face-to-face, the online medium offers additional opportunities for community-building and alternative means of communication that facilitates participation by different types of learners. A sense of community, which has been defined as “the perception of similarity to others, and acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence… a feeling that one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure” (Sarason, 1974, p157), has been reported to foster learning (Rovai, 2002). Palloff and Pratt (2005) posited that online communities form by going through the same stages as face-toface communities and similar to Rovai (2001) have defined an effective online community as including: • A shared purpose or goal due to which they share experiences, resources and information in the community • A virtual environment that enables online interactions • Collaborative learning due to active participation • Guidelines for behavior amongst the community • Trust and support among participants Participants in the educational technology course described in this paper were administrators, teachers, and faculty developers in K-12 and higher education settings. The instructor designed the wiki to draw on the prior teaching and learning experience of the participants and to encourage them to share experiences and resources about the application of online technologies to K-12 and higher education environments.
Designing and Implementing a Wiki in an Educational Technology Course The wiki in the educational technology graduate course in this study used pbwiki.com and served as the course website. Wiki software allows for different user settings for different parts of the wiki which are – administrator, editor, writer, reader, view only. The instructor was the sole administrator for the whole wiki and all students had “writer” rights to the wiki. Students were not required to contribute to the wiki except in the Group area where group members interacted to work on their group assignment. Unlike many courses that use wikis, the course did not require online discussions about readings or course topics. Table 1: The different areas of the wiki, their user settings, and the ways in which they were used Wiki areas Readings; Technical documentation; Assignments
Student and Instructor Use Although the readings, assignments, and technical documentation were mainly contributed by the instructor, students sometimes edited the web links in the Readings area, added resources to the Technical Documentation area, and asked questions about assignments on the Assignments area.
Resources and Links
Calendar Group pages (edit rights only to group participants) Individual projects (edit rights to the individual only)
Students added links to various online resources like research articles, news articles, Youtube videos, podcasts, and cartoons. They also uploaded Powerpoints or media clips that they had used before or created in earlier courses to share with their peers. Students added events and webinars to the calendar that could be of interest to peers and the instructor. This area was used by the individual groups to develop their ideas for their group assignment, and to solicit advice or input from their peers and instructor. This area served as a space for each student to articulate their ideas for their projects, receive input from the peers and instructor, pose questions, and present their work-in-progress.
The Wiki Design and Sense of Community Three different data points are being used to answer the following question about the use of the wiki in an educational technology course: - Do students develop a sense of community due to their use of a wiki in the course? How prevalent is that sense of community once the course ends? First, at the end of the educational technology course described above, the participants were asked to e-mail their response to open-ended questions about their use of the wiki in the course to the researcher. It was made clear to them that their responses would remain confidential and that they would not impact the course grade. In order to determine whether participants continue to use the wiki or have found it useful after the course duration, the same participants will receive a survey about sense of community and learning three months after the end of the course. The survey contains questions about their use of the wiki and their perceptions of its usefulness for building community. The survey and its development are not the focus of this paper and are therefore not described here. Although quantitative data – counting student contributions to the wiki – is not a measure of student learning, the number of times students added content or make changes during as well as after the course will be counted in order to track students’ participation during and after the course. This will help supplement the data provided by students in the survey three months after the end of the course. It is possible that students will only log in to look for new material but might not add new material to the wiki. However, since ‘active’ participation is an element of learning community, only student contribution is counted as participation in this study.
Instructor and Student Feedback on Wiki Use The goal of the instructor in using a wiki in this course was to encourage the participants to - pool their knowledge and resources - share and learn from their prior and current experiences using technology in their practice - communicate and reflect on how technology use is changing their practice and educational environment The instructor had hoped for student interaction and contributions on the course wiki, but was not prepared for the quantity and quality of the contributions that came in from students. The ‘Resources and Links’ area surpassed her expectations and became a repository of resources that could be used by both the instructor and the students in the future. She had hoped that students would contribute when not in the classroom, but found that students would add content from their laptops during class discussions, as they mentioned a resource or a reading. For example, if they referred to the concept of digital natives/immigrants or to cyber bullying, they would find and link to the articles or news items on the Internet within minutes of mentioning it in the class. In one case, a class comment or discussion reminded a student of another professor’s presentation in another class, so he logged on to the website for that other course, downloaded the Powerpoint, and uploaded it to the wiki. In that instance, the instructor then discussed what could be appropriate use of materials and how credit could be given to the other professor for using his online resources. In yet another situation, a student was reminded of a movie shown in a previous course, went to the PBS website and linked to that movie before the class discussion was over, enabling the instructor to show that movie in
the class that very day. According to the instructor, the active contribution of resources by students influenced the content of the course as well as the motivation and engagement of the students. All 14 students in the course were contacted by email after their completion of the course and asked for their feedback on the benefits and challenges of using a course wiki in the educational technology course. Ten of the 14 students responded. When the feedback and comments were analyzed and summarized, the most common themes that emerged were - Ease of use of the wiki - Sharing of resources - Being engaged with the content and the class - Feeling of belonging to a group Ease of use and sharing of resources: Eight of the 10 students who responded stated that the wiki had been very easy to use and that it was a “great one-stop place for resources.” Other students reported that the speed with which they could share resources, comment on the resources contributed, and see the repository of information grow made them aware of how such technology could be effectively used for sharing information. Two students mentioned that it was easier to user than a course management system they had previously used. Being engaged with the content and the class One student stated that The wiki kept the class going for me through the week. I thought about the course topics continuously, checked out the resources as the emails came in. It made me feel I belonged to a group with common interests and my passion for improving education. The “emails” referred to by the student were updates received every time someone made a change to the wiki, which was a default setting in the wiki software. The same feature was disliked by two students because they did not want to be informed every time someone made a change to wiki content. It would be important to draw students’ attention to their ability to turn this feature on or off as this might influence their use of the wiki. Feeling of belonging a group Forty percent of the students mentioned that the Individual projects area and the Group pages helped them learn and create projects with peer feedback and “bouncing of ideas.” One student stated that the similar interests of the group helped create “positive group feeling” and that peers could be “relied on to help you think about.”
Discussion This paper describes the ways in which a wiki was used by one instructor in an educational technology course to build community and encourage collaboration among participants. Contribution to the wiki was not a requirement and the instructor structured the wiki to facilitate student participation. The students’ willingness to contribute resources and reflect on course topics contributed to the success of the wiki in the course discussed in this paper. The participants in these courses were motivated individuals who were enthusiastic about sharing their experiences and excited about their use of technology. Although the instructor had hoped for student-student interaction and attempted to “relinquish” control to the students, the students took control of their learning experience to an extent that the instructor modified course content based on their contributions. Student contributions remained relevant to the course topics due to the guidelines provided by the instructor. For instance, the instructor provided criteria for the types of resources that could be shared by participants (opinion pieces, blog entries, newspaper articles, media clips) and instructions for respectful interaction with peers. The themes and comments that emerged from the email feedback often referred to “sharing” and learning with peers who had similar interests and ideas. The course content – the integration of technology into teaching in various settings – was the common goal that drove participants to share their experiences and find solutions in the virtual environment. Their engagement with the content and with each other corresponds to the active participation defined as an element of community by Rovai (2001) and Palloff and Pratt (2005). The feedback provided by students and the interactions on the wiki indicate that the different elements of community were present in the course. Nevertheless, the results of the survey that is planned will provide insight into the participants’ perceptions of sense of community due to the wiki. Participants continue to use the wikis to share and discuss their practice after the end of the course. Two participants have suggested moving the wiki to a Facebook group to continue their communication using a different medium. The quantitative tracking of students’ continued use of the wiki will help determine how students’ interactions and contributions change after the course is over and when the course goals no longer serve as a shared purpose.
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