Practical Applications of Research: Wikis for learning – what to expect by Dr. Irene Boland

PAR for July 1, 2009

Background: Three researchers at the University of Plymouth, UK (Steve Wheeler, Peter Yeomans and Dawn Wheeler) analyzed feedback from 35 university students who were required to use a wiki to collaboratively build content related to their subject of study. Wikis enable learners to quickly and easily publish a variety of items to the web, including: text, images, video and hyperlinks. Learners are able to edit their own and others’ work and can monitor and “rollback” the page to a prior version if a recent edit was incorrect. The collaborative learning process enables learners to develop themselves into a community of practice. Because the learners were aware that an audience of their peers, and potentially strangers, would be reading their writing – they spent more thought and effort when composing their wiki pages than they would have spent on a paper for their teachers eyes only.

Important: This study used anecdotal information, also known as personal stories of experience. This means that it’s not generalizable to a larger audience – or that you can’t assume that what they found to be true in their group of 35 students would also necessarily be true for your learners. However, you can learn from their experience and use it to properly plan for effective use of wikis as a collaborative learning tool.

The theory of this research: Social Constructivism. Learning is best when learners collaborate to create knowledge products that answer practical questions that matter to the learners.

The visual metaphor of the theory: Funnel versus Web.

Traditional Classroom Learning

Social Constructivist Learning Web

With wikis, learners:

• Have easy access to a living knowledgebase they can read, and modify
• Can share their ideas directly with teachers, peers, and the greater world
• Receive immediate feedback from readers
• Develop a natural curiousity about how others are responding to, or modifying, their work. This causes them to return to the wiki regularly.
• Can bring a wide variety of apparently unrelated resources together to make a cohesive and sensible body of knowledge
• Can chart their own course for learning based on their interests
• Become influenced by their peers and can exert influence over their peers – shaping the direction and tone of the learning.
• Can feel connected to others, even if physically distant or not online at the same time.
• Learn by reading the postings of others, even if they themselves don’t post.
• Develop their own methods of classifying content in ways that make sense to them, rather than using existing systems of classification.
• Help their peers find relevant content by assigning tags or keywords to pages

Issues with use of wikis for learning include:

• Learners who are new to wikis will need to gain an understanding of what the tool is and does and how to use it in a disciplined and purposeful way.
• Learners may have anxiety related to using a new technology, sharing credit for collaborative work, or exposing their work to public view.
• Learners working in teams may manage responsibilities by distributing the work in an organized way. This provides a fair amount of work per learner, but can also result in each learner reading and editing only their own pages, or pages to which the learner contributed – and not learning from others in their team or in other teams.
• Learners take pride in their work, and also can develop a defensive sense of territory and boundaries – not wanting any other learners to modify their work.
• Technical issues with some blogs prevent successful synchronous collaboration. If two learners are editing the same page at the same time, one’s work will be overwritten by the other’s work.
• In the absence of a standard required structure for participating, some participants will stop writing.
• Learners might focus on visual design and layout rather than on the quality of content creation

To be successful at wiki learning:

• Learners need to know how to evaluate information sources to determine if they are useful, accurate and trustworthy before deciding to include them.
• Learners need to be motivated to work on their own time, outside of a classroom setting, without direct supervision.
• Learners need to be prepared for the possibility that their work will be edited, expanded or deleted by other learners in the wiki community.
• The most important criteria for evaluating wiki contributions should be the accuracy and usefulness.
• Learners need to know how to cite and reference outside works so as not to accidentally plagiarize.

Can wiki content possibly be accurate and trustworthy? Yes, scientific measurement shows that Wikipedia is just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.

 Reference: Steve Wheeler, Peter Yeomans and Dawn Wheeler. British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 39, Number 6, 2008, page numbers 987-995.

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