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Teaching, Learning, and Other Uses for Wikis in Academia
11/15/2005
To be frank, we found the democratized framing of the wiki to be unduly constraining; many of our faculty collaborators had extremely thoughtful projects that required varying levels of collaborative engagement among the wiki members that wouldn't have worked if everyone had full edit privileges. It was with this orientation, and through a series of pilot projects with various faculty members, students, and research groups in the Fall semester of 2005, that the CST identified the following six general approaches for how wikis could be implemented around campus.Approach 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, to establish the habit of regular reflection, 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.
Approach 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
make connections between and among those assets.
Approach 3: Collaborative Knowledge Base
In the more classic use of the 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.
Approach 4: Research Coordination and Collaboration
The wiki allows multiple collaborators who are separated by physical space to
collect ideas, papers, timelines, documents, datasets, and study results into
a collective digital space. Researchers can also use the space to store draft
files for their papers: MS Word, LaTEX, or even writing directly into the Web
pages of the wiki. Additionally, funders and junior researchers can be given
"read only" access to all or certain parts of the space.
Approach 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 and T.A.s 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.
Use Case 6: Conference and Colloquia Web Site/Coordination
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.
Of course, there are many other ways to use the wiki in an academic setting, but these represent the general categories of use that we've begun to see emerge on our campus.
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