Wiki: A Web Based Technology for Reflective, Collaborative and Constructive Learning in Higher Education Noushad Husain* Introduction In the educational arena, there is a growing emphasis on the need to support learners not only to acquire knowledge and information, but also to develop the resources and skills necessary to engage with social and technical change for lifelong learning (Owen, Grant, Sayers & Facer, 2006). There are also changes in our understanding of practices of creativity and innovation - from the idea of the isolated individual to the concept of 'communities of practice', where reflection and feedback are important collaborative processes. The notion of the creative society and the constant demand for education increase the need for efficient and technology assisted instruction. Educational activities realized in a traditional classroom setting are not efficient anymore in meeting the educational needs of the current century. Conventional education is realized beyond the borders of the classrooms as well. Modern educational approaches and changing roles of educators put new responsibilities on both teachers and learners. The traditional view of education, where teachers serve as the source of knowledge while learners serve as passive receivers, has been outdated. In this respect, information and communication technologies provide powerful equipment and facilities to transform teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered and interactive learning environments (UNESCO, 2002). Among these facilities, wikis are considered as indispensable tools since they can enrich the instruction and social interaction among individuals through transferring in-class activities beyond the classroom.
The practices of participating in wikis, and social software more generally, could potentially provide a structure supporting a community of practice model of learning (Grant 2006). Individuals come together and develop a repertoire of shared practices, bringing new experiences to the group and learning from the group's existing practices. The wiki itself can be seen as both the site of participation and the artefact that acts as a record of that community's practices. Wikis have been considered as one of a number of new and powerful forms of 'social software' capable of supporting a range of collaborative learning activities. The combination of the educational agenda which highlights the social dimensions of learning and the technological affordances of wikis offers insights for transformational shifts in educational practice.
* Associate Professor, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, College of Teacher Education, Danishgah Islamia High School Campus, Hutton Road, Asansol-713301 (W .P.) E-mail:
[email protected] 1
What is a Wiki? Ward Cunningham used the word wiki (the Hawaiian word meaning quick) to name the collaborative tool he developed for use on the Internet in 1994. Wikis are fully editable websites. Users can visit, read, reorganize and update the structure and content (text and pictures) of a wiki as they see fit. This functionality is called open editing (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001).
In other words, a wiki is a Web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a Web browser and access to the Internet. This means that any visitor to the wiki can change its content if they desire. Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet. Variously described as a composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, a mail system, and a tool for collaboration, wikis provide users with both author and editor privileges. The wiki has great potential as a tool for online collaboration. A well known wiki is Wikipedia an online collaborative encyclopaedia, where anybody can edit and update the site content as they see fit (Wikipedia, 2004). Figure-1 shows relationship between community space and collaborative space of a person in wiki’s environment. It shows that a wiki is a strong tool for collaboration and cooperation between users.
Community Space
Collaborative Space
Wiki
Community Space
Figure-1: Relationship between Collaborative Space and Community Space of a User in a Wiki Environment
The Power of Wiki A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. A primary goal for many wikis is to encourage many authors to participate. Everyone can contribute by adding, changing or commenting on the content. Most importantly, the community of users provides quality control that keeps the content 'on topic'. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges 2
necessary but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be “rolled back” if necessary. Figures- 2 represents a traditional web page editing and publishing process, where the author pushes content to a passive crowd of internet users. Figure- 3, on the other hand, illustrates what a wiki web page is: a page that is readable and editable by every user.
Author/ Audience
Audience Author/ Audience Author
Web Page
Web Page
Author/ Audience
Audience
Author/ Audience
Audience
Figure 2: On a traditional web page, an author pushes content to visitors of a particular page.
Figure 3: A wiki page, on the other hand, can be read and edited by any visitor.
How Does Wiki Work? On the basis of nature, wikis have two versions, one for users and one for editors, which Raitman, Augar and Zhou (2004) name read and edit.
1. Read Version Wikis are in read state by default. Read state means, that the wiki page looks just like a normal webpage. The read version is the one seen by all users who are not editing the wiki and it resembles an average webpage. This is usually the version that the creators of the wiki want to show to the majority of end users, who come use the information, not to contribute. 3
2. Edit Version When the user wants to edit the wiki page, they must access the wikis edit state. To edit a wiki, a user points their Internet browser to the wiki URL (eg.http:// www.wikipedia.org/) and clicks an edit button or link featured on each wiki page. Wikipedia provides a tab style format at the top of each page which contains a clickable link entitled 'edit this page' which users can click to access Wikipedia's edit state.
Style of Wikis Because wikis were designed to be collaborative editing tools, they also offer an easy way for editors to hold discussions in a manner similar to listserv or message board. Such discussions usually take place on 'talk' pages which accompany every article. As such, wikis can be said (Augar, Raitman and Zhou 2004) to have two different writing styles: the document style which is used for editing the main content visible to end users and the thread style which is used by editors to communicate with each other.
1. Document Style or Mode The first wiki style of usage is known as document mode. When used in document mode contributors create collaborative documents written in the third person. Authors leave their additions to the wiki document unsigned. As time passes, multiple authors edit and update the content of the document and gradually the content becomes a representation of the shared knowledge or beliefs of the contributors (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001).
2. Thread Style or Mode The second wiki writing mode is thread mode. Contributors carry out discussions in the wiki environment by posting signed messages. Others respond leaving the original messages intact and eventually a group of threaded messages evolves (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001).
Wikipedia: An Example of Wiki A well known wiki is Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia. org/), an online collaborative encyclopaedia, where anybody can edit and update the site content as they see fit (Wikipedia, 2004). The homepage of Wikipedia is depicted in Figure-4.
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Figure-4: Home Page of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia (Wales 2005). It can be defined as “a multilingual Webbased free-content encyclopedia”. Wikipedia allows users to modify encyclopedic entries by creating a reviewer and editing structure (Alexander, 2006). Wikipedia is shaped by the wisdom of the users and it is the richest source of information and terms especially for younger people (Madden & Fox, 2006). Illustrating the increasing popularity of wikis, a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 30% of Internet users visit Wikipedia to search terms and meanings (Madden & Fox, 2006). Interestingly, 24.25% of these users are between the ages of 18– 24. In this same age group, only 14.94% use Encarta's Online Encyclopedia (http://encarta.msn.com/). Wikis are useful in educational settings in that they support individualized learning, allowing for more socially defined search structures and promote collaboration through group editing and peer review (Alexander, 2006).
Basic Features of Wikis Ebersbach et al. (2006) note that the following basic features are common in wikis: 1. Editing: Most of the wikis use the same basic page editing functions such as text editing and image, table, list, hyperlink and file insertion. 5
2. Links: Each article can be linked to other articles and thus form a new network structure. 3. History: A function which saves all previous versions or modifications of any single page. It allows tracking of the editing processes of an article since all changes have been documented. 4. Recent Changes: This feature can provide a current overview of a certain number of recent changes to wiki pages or all changes within a predefined time period. 5. Search Functions: Most wikis also offer a classic full text or title search for wiki pages.
Wikis in Education Wikis have been successfully used in education as early as 1999 (Guzdial 1999). As with most computer technology, their educational uses were first pioneered by computer science academics (Edington et al. 2005) but now the wiki technology is starting to penetrate all fields of academia and the use of wikis for educational (and other) applications is increasing.(Edington et al. 2005, Schwartz et al. 2004). There are an increasing number of positive reviews of wiki technology as well as a growing number of academics who endorse wiki technology in their papers. Bergin (2002) writes about advantages of having a wiki for each of his courses and notes: "It gives me a way to communicate easily and asynchronously with [students] on course topics. They also use it to communicate with me and each other. I also use it to quickly dispel misconceptions and correct errors I might make in class." Prensky (2004) suggested that wiki functionality is so crucial it should be an integral part of the new generation of teaching software. Bruns and Humphrey (2005) note that “the wiki form is one that encourages and enables learning in ways that many other Web-based tools fail to do.”
The Pedagogy behind Wiki Social constructivists believe that we learn by social and communal activities. Meaning is shaped and knowledge constructed through discussion with peers and teachers and through reflection (Higgs and McCarthy, 2005). The collaborative nature of wikis means that they enact knowledge building with and for others, with the focus being on the community rather than on the individual learner. Wikis are one of the success stories in the world of social constructivism since they can be rapidly deployed and students can be very quickly operational (Notari, 2003).
Advantages of Wikis in Education Wikis are valuable for active learning. They seamless shift between the teaching paradigm and the learning paradigm and allow students to actively engage the material in ways difficult or impossible to achieve with traditional pages. Wikis are more than 'streamlined webpages', they allow us to design new 6
teaching activities impossible without them. Allowing students to actively discover knowledge can increase the efficiency of teaching (Wagenaar 1995) and has a positive impact upon students' learning (Ruhl, Hughes and Schloss 1987). It increases the students' interest and involvement in the subject matter, the amount of knowledge they retain, and facilitates teacher-students’ contact in distance learning. Some advantages of Wiki in a teaching environment are given below (Bristow 2005, Connell 2005, Edington et al. 2005, Godwin 2003, Lamb 2004, O'Neill 2005, Schwartz et al. 2004): •
fast and easy creation of simple websites for any purpose
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easy course administration, timetabling, etc.
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use of online and easy to update course syllabi
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facilitating collaborative contribution to documents and group authoring
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tracking a group project on 'per contributor' basis
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project development with on-site peer review
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discussion boards
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user support and documentation
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virtual group study rooms
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data collection
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student feedback and self-assessment
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review classes, resources and teachers
• collaborative lecture notes Types of Educational Wikis Tonkin (2005) identifies four different types of educational wikis: 1. Single User Wikis: Single-user wikis allow an individual to collect and edit his or her own thoughts using a Web-based environment. 2. Lab Book Wikis: Lab book wikis allow students to keep notes online with the added benefit of allowing them to be peer reviewed and changed by fellow students. 3. Collaborative Writing Wikis: Collaborative writing wikis can be used by a team for joint writing. 4. Knowledge Base Wikis: Knowledge base wikis provide a knowledge repository for a group.
Educational Uses of Wikis Duffy and Bruns (2006) list several possible educational uses of wikis: •
Students can use a wiki to develop research projects, with the wiki serving as ongoing documentation of their work. 7
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Students can add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings, building a collaborative annotated bibliography on a wiki.
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A wiki can be used for publishing course resources like syllabi and handouts and students can edit and comment on these directly for all to see.
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Teachers can use wikis as a knowledge base, enabling them to share reflections and thoughts regarding teaching practices and allowing for versioning and documentation.
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Wikis can be used to map concepts. They are useful for brainstorming and editing a given wiki topic can produce a linked network of resources.
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A wiki can be used as a presentation tool in place of conventional software and students are able to directly comment on and revise the presentation content.
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Wikis are tools for group authoring. Often group members collaborate on a document by emailing to each member of the group a file that each person edits on their computer and some attempt is then made to coordinate the edits so that everyone’s work is equally represented; using a wiki pulls the group members together and enables them to build and edit the document on a single, central wiki page.
Research Studies on Use of Wikis in Higher Education There are a number of studies that have explored a Wiki’s potential to support collaborative learning in the context of higher education. For example, Elgort and colleagues (2008) considered students' and lecturers' views on using wikis in the context of course group work. They argue that the results seem encouraging, indicating that both the students and the instructors saw value in using wikis as a tool for collaboration. Furthermore, the case study performed by Raitman, Augar and Zhou (2004) tests students’ sense of security (identity) when using wikis for online collaboration. Two wikis were set up; one required user login and one remained anonymous. The results showed the students preferred a user login wiki since they felt more secure. The wiki with required user login had significantly higher usage (number of pages, number of edits, number of views, etc.) than the anonymous wiki. The secure environment gave students a sense of honor and trust in their research and collaboration that nurtured collaborative work for which they were confident in claiming ownership. Finally, as it is demonstrated in Cubric’s (2007) study, Wikis promote more active students’ engagement, better understanding of the importance of feedback and more appreciation for the collaborative learning requirement.
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Wikis Promotes Reflective, Collaborative and Constructive Learning A Wiki is a social tool and it is basically used in education to support cooperation and collaboration between students. Students can use a wiki environment to support individual learning or to contribute to the learning of others. In the context of higher education, Wikis can be used as a tool that promotes collaboration within students in order for them to accomplish a specific task or an assignment. Furthermore, a Wiki space seems ideal for collaborative learning as students are able to cooperate in order to prepare, compose, edit, review, assess and publish an agenda, a document a project or a report. Students can edit a document as many times as it is required, from wherever they are and whenever they want. Moreover, higher education’s students have more opportunities to be engaged with learners from other cultures. As a result, this will raise students’ global awareness and will help them develop cultural understandings for digital citizenship. Figure-5 shows that how wiki can promote collaborative and constructive learning environment in higher education. Teacher/Instructor Students and other Learners
Assess
Delete
Revise/Edit
Edit
Comment
Department
Contribute
Syndicate
Collaborative Creation of Web Pages
Reference
Review
Study
Review
External Assessors (Accreditation)
Figure-5: Schematic Diagram Showing Collaborative and Constructive Learning Environment of Wiki in Higher Education
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Wikis can be additionally used in the context of higher education as a tool that promotes students’ critical thinking skills. In general, students use critical thinking skills in order to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make decisions regarding the resources that will be used. Learning theories suggest that critiquing, suggesting, sharing ideas and data are skills that formulate learning. Therefore, and because of the fact that a Wiki is a tool that promotes critiquing learning skills, it can be used as a digital environment for creative decision making. Through that environment students will have the opportunity not only to suggest, share ideas, concerns, and data beyond the limits of the classroom and classroom activities, but also they will have the ability to discuss and debate for both the content and the format of the composed paper (Guth, 2007). Undoubtedly, discussing and debating can be considered as powerful tools for correcting mistakes, and product constructivism learning.
Wikis allow learners to participate in collaboratively building resources. An essential part of reflective learning is that learners should be encouraged to reflect on their knowledge and make itexplicit. Wikis allow this reflection to be done collaboratively, moving closer to a fully social constructivist mode of learning. Because of their very low technological barriers yet very rich and flexible functionality, wikis afford the opportunity to offer collaborative, constructive learning more extensively in our educational environments (McMullin, 2005).
Some Innovative Uses of Wikis in Higher Education There are a lot of advantages and uses of wikis in higher education. Figure-6 clearly shows some uses of wikis in higher education. Student Journaling
Metacognitive Reflection
Curricular and Cross Disciplinary Coordination
Create and Assess
Collaborative Knowledge Base
Share and Edit
Syndicating/ Aggregating Web
Inter-term Multiple Views of Assets
Student
Ongoing Organization
Resources Database and Revise
Research Coordination and Collaboration
Plan and Develop
Conference and Colloquia Website/Coordination
Collect Assets Personal Portfolios
Figure-6: Uses of Wiki in Higher Education
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Project Management
1. Student Journaling Instructors want students to journal for a number of reasons: to demonstrate writing proficiency, to expose understanding (and misunderstanding) of conceptual knowledge (such as in Just-in-Time Teaching exercises) and to engage in meta-cognitive reflection, to name a few. The wiki allows students to journal for their own benefit or for peer or instructor review.
2. Personal Portfolios By enabling students to collect and organize digital assets such as course notes, images, web resources and PowerPoint slides, the wiki can help learners to organize materials and make connections between and among those assets.
3. Collaborative Knowledge Base In the more classic use of a wiki, groups can use the environment to create a shared knowledge base of information. This can be used to allow students to develop a project in small groups, to work on a small piece of a larger class project or even to have students themselves create and maintain the course Web site.
4. Research Coordination and Collaboration The wiki allows multiple collaborators who are separated by physical space to collect ideas, papers, timelines, datasets, documents and study results into a collective digital space. Researchers can also use the space to store draft files for their papers: MS Word or even writing directly into the web pages of the wiki. Additionally, finders and researchers can be given “read only” access to all or certain parts of the space.
5. Curricular and Cross Disciplinary Coordination As departments become increasingly creative in their efforts to accommodate more students in a distributed/blended learning environment, curricular coordination among faculty gets increasingly important. The wiki allows for departmental personnel, instructors and teaching assistants to organize common course assets, such as syllabi, office hours and assessments, without having an endless email chain or difficult to schedule face-to-face meetings.
6. Conference and Colloquia Website/Coordination 11
Many departments, schools and scholarly centers at the university have academic conferences and colloquia. By allowing presenters and attendees access to add and edit content, the conference wiki can serve as a resource before, during, and after the event itself. The wiki can also be used by conference administrators as a means of organizing the event.
7. Syndicating/Aggregating Web Resources As part of the greater family of social software, wikis allow users both to pull in resources from other sources on the Web and to push content out from the wiki into other spaces. Examples of types of resources that one might want to include would be channels from news sites, blogs, other wikis or collaborative or personal feeds in Web-based social networking tools such as del.icio.us or flickr.
8. Inter-term Project Management In production classes such as those in computer science and other school subject programs, some projects span multiple terms or even multiple years. The wiki can be used to manage projects over time, even as the individual students (and even instructors) change.
WikiEducator: An Innovative Project for Education Community WikiEducator (http://wikieducator.org) is as a website for educators to develop free educational content that anyone can use, modify and distribute. As the WikiEducator community has evolved, distinct uses of the site have emerged. It is a community project working collaboratively with the free culture movement towards a free version of the education curriculum by 2015. WikiEducator assist people who wish to contribute to the project by directing them towards existing projects that need help, tutorials and resources on how to contribute, as well as guiding people who may wish to use WikiEducator for their own teaching and learning situations towards available content and resources. WikiEducator focuses on: •
Building capacity in the use of Mediawiki and related free software technologies for masscollaboration in the authoring of free content;
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Developing free content for use in schools, polytechnics, universities, vocational education institutions and informal education settings;
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Facilitating the establishment of community networks and collaboration with existing free content initiatives in education;
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Fostering new technologies that will widen access, improve quality and reduce the cost associated with providing education, primarily through the use of free content.
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e-Gyankosh Wiki: An Experiment of IGNOU e-Gyankosh (www.egyankosh.ac.in) Wiki is a nice imitative by IGNOU, students/anybody can register freely and can download IGNOU resourses/material on any topic easily and freely. One can download materials of B.A./M.A./Certificate courses etc. on anytime. This e-repository of knowledge envisages storing, indexing, preserving, distributing and sharing the digital learning resources for open & distancing learning institutes. E-Gyankosh Wiki facilitates any time access to its collections (24×7×365), offering interoperability and federated searching facility.
Methodology of Delivering Online Courses through Wiki Wiki paradigm can be used to enable a quick, easy and convenient management system of online course content. Wiki system can be used as a communication interface between students and the instructor. Using this interface, pages can be created and modified quickly and easily. Teachers/instructors can publish course materials, post announcements, presentations timetable, etc into the web. If the student is enrolled in the course, he can edit these pages and can add, for example, his presentation title to the presentations timetable or his paper abstract to the term paper page, etc. Moreover, all the pages can be used as a public or private repository, in which students post their homework and limit access of these materials to the instructor. Below I am given the basic interface and functionality of delivering wiki-based online course:
1. Authorization and Authentication This is the main login page (see figure-7). All users, students, instructors and the system administrator use this page to log in. This page uses server side authentication and authorization.
Figure-7: Loging Page of Wiki Online Course 13
2. New User Registration New students and instructors use this page to obtain username and password. 3. Student Main Menu Student main page shows the student status in the wiki system. It lists the student’s status per class. A student status can be active (if an instructor accepted him) so that he/she can edit the course page. Otherwise, the status is pending (waiting for course instructor authorization). 4. Student Add Course Page The student uses this page to view all active courses in the system and any course to his records. The student is added directly with a pending status by default.
Figure-8: Student to Add New Courses 5. Student Edit Information Page The student uses this page to view and edit his information, such as first name, last name, email and password.
6. Instructor Main Menu The instructor’s main page shows a list of all students who want to enroll in their courses. The instructor is given the option to view their information, such as name and email to ensure they are activating the correct student. Activating a student will change the student status to active, thus she will be able to edit the course page.
7. Instructor Add Courses The instructor uses this page to view his current courses in the system and to create new courses as well.
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8. View Course Details Instructor uses this page to view students’ status per course, and the course web page.
9. Administrator Main Menu The administrator main page shows a list of all pending instructors and the administrator’s pending students. Activating an instructor will allow the instructor to create new courses. Note that the instructor is activated once, unlike a student, who needs activation per course. The administrator is also given the option to view the pending instructors and student information such as name and email.
10. Edit Users’ Information Page Administrator has the privilege to view all existent users in the system with all their information. Moreover, he can change their information, reset passwords and remove users.
11. XHTML Edit Page This is the most important page that the system has. To edit the page, browse to the page you want to edit and double click anyplace in the page body. The whole text of the page should be transformed into a large text area box to allow changing page contents. Input language in this version is XHTML, unlike the wiki markup language used in this first version of this project. If the user who is editing the page is the owner of the page, there will be two more check boxes shown at the bottom of the text field named “modifiable by users” and “visible by others”. These are the page attributes that can be set by the owner of the page to grant or deny to other users the ability to view or modify the page.
Evaluation Mechanism in Wiki Based Online Teaching- Learning Process Wikis can be used to assist teaching and learning (Raman, Ryan, & Olfman, 2005; Parker & Chao, 2007). However, because of the specific needs of instruction, assignments and evaluation, classroom wikis need to be designed very intelligently. When we apply the wiki paradigm in a classroom environment, instructors have to formulate an evaluation model for fairness of individual and group assessments. Students need to finish group assignments based on instructors’ requirements and within a limited timeframe. Students need to know their specific responsibilities, how they interact and collaborate with others and their own progress as well as that of others. Instructors may need to act as “Editor-in- Chief” to manage scope, schedule, evaluation and quality of contents (De PeDro et al., 2006). From this point of view, wikis that support mandatory collaborative writing cannot be open or arbitrary. Both students and instructors need to have specific roles and have to finish their tasks in a certain time period.
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Here I am given a model of evaluation mechanism (See Figure-9) in MediaWiki for the clear understanding of the readers that how evaluation of the students can be done very effectively and accurately in MediaWiki based teaching-learning process. We take MediaWik because it is one of the world’s most popular wikis. Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki and it is easy to install, configure and use. According to Barrett (2009), there are more than 2,000 wiki sites that use MediaWiki. The Performance Database that we will incorporate into MediaWiki will record all the accesses and the actions performed by users (e.g., user identification, time and date, host computer, wiki page (workspace), activity, task and type of action ) when they edit a wiki content page, including adding comments and discussions from the Discussion Database. The Quantitative Analysis Tool queries a variety of parameters such as the number of student contributions during a period, the number of hourly accesses for a group in an activity, the number of contributions by each student, the number of contributions by each student for all the group members in an activity, contributions of each group to each task, the number of contributions by students for an activity, and the evaluation of each discussion of a task, to display when users request it (Barros & Felisa Verdejo, 2000). The output of the Quantitative Analysis is information on students’ participation.
Interaction User Log
Interaction and Contribution User Log
Quantitative Analysis
Feedback Analysis
Performance Database and Discussion Database
List of Students’ Participation Summary of Feedback of Each Student Instructors
Interaction and Contribution User Log
Conclusion Database List of Messages for Improving the Students’ Interaction
Instructor Analysis
Students
Instructor Knowledge Base
Content Layer
Interface Layer
Figure-9: Evaluation Mechanism in Wiki Based Online Teaching- Learning Process
The Instructor Analysis Tool uses simple inference rules to generate messages following the pattern “if attribute-value then message.” The Instructor Knowledge Base is composed of the definitions of the 16
attributes of the sets and the rules relating to them. It can include the number of contributions that each student added, the mean size of a student’s contributions, the number of contributions authored by others that have been answered by this student and the number of contributions authored by the student that were continued or answered (Barros & Felisa Verdejo, 2000). The Instructor Analysis Tool uses the results of the Performance Database as input and generates feedback messages based on students’ performances. The instructor can modify the message before sending it. The Feedback Analysis Tool is used for improving group interaction. This module examines students’ contributions before and after the instructor sends out a message. It retrieves data from the Conclusion Database to summarize feedback on each student to help instructors judge whether the feedback has been appropriate and increases students’ participation.
Getting Started With Wiki There are now thousands of wikis on the Internet and their numbers are growing rapidly. There are three important characteristics that differentiate wikis from traditional websites. First, one does not need to download any software to work with wikis. Second, learning how to edit a wiki is very easy and intuitive. Third, by default, wikis are designed to support collaborative projects and allow virtually anybody to edit anything (Konieczny, 2007). To create a new wiki one can download any of the available wiki packages, many of them free under open source licenses. However it is worth emphasizing that it is not necessary to have one's own dedicated wiki website for the purpose of using wikis as a teaching tool. An increasing number of universities (or their departments) are launching their own wikis for faculty and students (Alexa. 2006). I am giving below the name of some popular free wiki hosting services that can be used by faculty members and students for writing and sharing their ideas, thinking and to take the advantages of the rich information regarding the different disciplines available on these wikis: •
Wikipedia.org
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Wikispaces.com
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Wikimatrix.org
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Pbwiki.com
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Schtuff.com
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Wetpaint.com
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XWwiki.com
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Wikihost.com
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Riters.com
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Atwiki.com 17
The Role of a Teacher in Use of Wiki The use of wikis in education is related to the collaborative approach to learning. Such an approach requires the transformation of the role of teachers from authoritative instructors into mediated facilitators (Palloff & Pratt, 2005). The use of wikis in relation to collaborative learning in online and off-line courses depends on factors such as the effectiveness of the teacher/instructor in promoting group collaboration, the teacher's role in creating the course conditions and climate for establishing an online community and the teacher's ability to engage students to be active participants and favour student led activities.
Conclusion Wikis and other emergent technologies are beginning to fill a gaping void in existing practice (Lamb, 2004). They enable extremely rich, flexible collaborations that have positive psychological consequences for their participants and powerful competitive ones for their organizations (Evans and Wolf, 2005). Collaborative creativity promises to be a key business skill in upcoming years. Educational institutions can offer immense value to their students by familiarizing them with the simple technologies that make collaborative networks possible. Today’s students will not only manage business innovations of the future but in many cases will drive them. Rather than being limited to today’s skills, students must learn the skills of the future. Educators need to teach what wikis and other social software may mean to business, not just as a phenomenon but also as a skill (Evans, 2006). By incorporating wikis into the classroom, educators can better prepare students to make innovative uses of collaborative software tools.
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