Wikis

Tag:

assessment, blogging, collaboration platform, feedback

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Description

A wiki is essentially a web page with an open-editing system. It is an online space, or database of pages of related material, including text, graphics, files and links, that facilitates collaborative creation and editing. Wiki pages can be edited by many people in different locations either simultaneously or at different times and can be shared in a variety of ways between whole and small groups of students. Students can easily track each other's contributions and teachers can go in and annotate, or provide feedback during the on-going process to help students with the development. There is not one specific software for creating Wikis, but the following are recommended:

OU Wiki tool - This is best used for creating a Wiki directly in Moodle. For more information, please visit the following UNSW Learning and Teaching page: Create a wiki activity in Moodle.
MediaWiki - This is an open source software (free) originally used for Wikipedia. For more information, please visit the MediaWiki website.

Best Practice

Wikis are ideal for:

Group projects that emphasise collaboration and editing
Students in online courses
Serving as a repository for course information and knowledge
Aiding mini research projects in which the wiki serves as documentation of student work
Creating collaborative annotated bibliographies where students add summaries and critiques about courses
Creating ePortfolios of student work

Click HERE for more information on best practices.

Pros/Cons

Pros:

Provide a means of sharing and collaborating by increasing social interaction during the exchange of information
Make it easy to swap ideas and information on projects
Pages can be created and edited quickly while tracking changes and additions
Search the wiki's content and view updates since your last visit
Develop teamwork skills
End the waste of ricocheting emails and communication breakdowns, literally getting everyone 'on the same page'

Cons:

Take time - need to be effectively scaffolded through clear expectations and monitoring
Can sometimes be unorganised or difficult to navigate
Need to be conscious of privacy and security
Can also be issues of legal liability and risk to reputation, particularly if you publish to the web (options such as a moderated wiki format, user agreements and locking some pages from public view can offer protection)

Getting started

All you need to create and use a wiki is access to the internet. If you would like to create a wiki activity in Moodle using the OU Wiki tool, please follow this link for a step-by-step guide: Create a wiki activity in Moodle.

Training and Support:

A wide range of free training resources for learning how to use a Wiki can be found on Lynda.com, which UNSW Australia has a licence to. You can access Lynda.com HERE using your UNSW zID and password.

Showcase

This example demonstrates how a MediaWiki can be used to create an interactive platform of resources.

Mark Hill

The UNSW Embryology Wiki was created in 2009 as an interactive platform of embryology resources for Medicine and Science students. It is an online education and research website that houses content for all lectures and practicals for the embryology courses in Medicine and Science. Content includes links to the lectures, videos, audio files, images, PDFs, terminology and suggested textbooks. The wiki is used during lectures and practicals to deliver the content and can be revisited by students outside of class to review information and to enrich their understanding with additional self-directed learning resources and external links. The site also includes practical support pages for Neuroanatomy and Histology classes in the Science program. The content found on these pages is not direct lecture material, but rather provide only background information for student self-directed learning purposes.

The wiki is also used for submitting assessments. For the Embryology course in the Science program, students are required to submit individual assessments and a semester-long group project through the website and feedback is given directly on the page. Submission dates can be locked so students cannot submit or edit after the deadline. Projects remain online so students can look at previous projects to see how they have been submitted and assessed in the past. Projects include a discussion page which allows students to interact and collaborate online throughout the project, in addition to the 10 minutes set aside at the end of each practical for project group discussions. There is also a peer review section which allows each student to review all other projects and provide feedback on the discussion page.

Time-wise using the wiki is no worse than assessing items submitted as hard copies or via other means of submitting written reports. Not only does it minimise the amount of printing, it also provides the opportunity to give lots of feedback.

To view the wiki, please click HERE.

Below are some images demonstrating what the UNSW Embryology Wiki looks like:

1. The main page

2. The 'Science' main page

3. Links to classes available via the Medicine page

4. 'Week 4' of the Embryology course

5. Audio links

6. Video links

This example demonstrates how the OU Wiki inside Moodle can be used in self-directed group projects.

Richard Vickery

The OU Wiki (Moodle plug-in) is used as a framework in which students conduct a self-directed project which involves working in small teams to identify a media item related to the neuroscience and then analysing the neuroscience context, and the quality of the media item. The project has a peer-review at the draft stage. It is effectively an easy way for students to build a web-site which enables them to link in a media item that might be audio, video or article. The OU wiki was chosen as it is integrated into Moodle. Several similar tools have been used in the past and Wikispaces is actually a better platform as it is more flexible and friendly with a better history feature, but the Moodle integration of the OU wiki means that the students are not required to create new accounts, and it also reduces issues around copywrite violations by students posting material in their wiki.

The advantages of using a Wiki for project work are that it provides a nice way for students to work together and to show off their work to other student teams. Some take great pride in creating a good-looking and easily navigable wiki page. It allows monitoring of the contributions of individual group members to completing to the final product, which can then be used as a component of their team-work mark. To set up a wiki and do the basics is fairly simple as it resides inside Moodle. Fancy formatting is tricky, but it not necessary.

Although the wiki has an annotation function which in theory is a nice way to comment on the wiki by linking comments to words, in practice, as the wiki gets edited, many of the annotations become orphans and lose even the name of their originator. In future projects, students will be asked to create a linked page in the wiki where they can have their discussions and where feedback from peer reviewers and assessors can be placed.

To view an example of a self-directed group project (html only - no images), please click HERE.

Below are some images taken from this example (with images):

1. The wiki

2. Student content

3. Peer reviews

4. Markers comments

5. Collaboration between group members

Comparison

Not sure whether to use a blog, wiki or forum? Perhaps this comparison chart available on the UNSW Learning and Teaching website will help you decide.

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