Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Wikis - advantages and disadvantages
A wiki is a universally-editable website with minimal formatting. The word comes from the Hawaiian wiki-wiki which means "quick".
Advantages of using wikis in learning and teaching
- No special software needed
- Immediate posting of content
- Low graphics content - fast loading
- Simple or complex hypertext structure as required
- Can have email notification of new content
- Can track changes
- Can have associated discussions
- Can easily link to other wikis and websites
- If students do not like what they see, such as the approach taken by others, they may be more inclined to participate in order to propose an alternative approach.
- Facilitates collaborative and constructivist approaches to learning
- Students can see what they are learning
Although it is "new" technology in learning, wikis could soon move into the "Pets' Corner" or familiar area of the Media Zoo.
Disdvantages of using wikis in learning and teaching
- Students reluctant to make public unfinished working documents
- Students reluctance to let others contribute changes.
- Students very competitive about changes
- All content modifiable including pages for instructions, handouts etc.
- Simultaneous edits are allowed but not successful
- No standardised markup/spellcheck - formatting is basic
- No equations or drawing
- Institutional wikis vs external wikis: using external wikis brings problems of copyright, ownership, continuity, etc.
- Institutional IT policies: still relies on an infrastructure that enables the permissions to be set appropriately (e.g., some universities allow wikis to be editable only by those with University accounts)
- The wiki is forever evolving.
- Not really appropriate for tracking contributions or discussion, following individual students
- When new to both tutors and students lack of familiarity causes problems: can cause confusion and lack of clarity
- Staff opposition to student collaboration
- Research shows that on moving to an online environment, even groups that already know one another well face-to-face have to go through the access and socialisation stages, albeit in a more abbreviated manner, to be able to work together collaboratively in an effective manner.
(For reference list see this post)
Labels: e-learning, elearning, HE, online learning, wiki, wiki bibliography, wiki-tivities, wikis, wikitivities
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:01 AM
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Wiki bibliography
A lot more information has been added to the wiki bibliography post.Labels: bibliography, wiki
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:56 AM
Monday, 20 August 2007
See you at ALT-C
I will be attending the ALT-C conference : ALT-C, Beyond Control, Learning technology for the social network generation in Nottingham on 4-6 September 2007.
I'll be there with my colleagues Ale Armellini, Sylvia Jones and Gilly Salmon. We'll be running a practical workshop on Wiki-tivities. I'm writing it now... it should be a good experience.
It's from 4-5.30pm on Wednesday 5th September.
http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=1155
See you there?
Also, my old colleagues at NCSL are running a Pre-conference Workshop: on NCSL's Tools for eLearning at the Learning and Conference Centre, Nottingham. Lunch from 12:30. Starts 13:00, ends 16:00.
More at the conference websiteLabels: ALT, ALT-C, ALT-C2007, conference, e-learning, Nottingham, wikis, workshop
posted by Helen Whitehead 1:36 PM
Sunday, 19 August 2007
Literature Factory
From my mailbox...You are invited to the grand opening of the Literature Factory at Kula 2 (187,7) in Second Life. What is a Literature Factory? Well now, that's a silly question, it's simply a factory that makes literature. According to Wikipedia:
"The term "literature" has different meanings depending on who is using it and in what context. It could be applied broadly to mean any symbolic record, encompassing everything from images and sculptures to letters. In a more narrow sense the term could mean only text composed of letters, or other examples of symbolic written language (Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example). An even more narrow interpretation is that text have a physical form, such as on paper or some other portable form, to the exclusion of inscriptions or digital media."
Well, we certainly meet that criteria, excepting the physical form bit, but we hope you'll appreciate the transgression.
Now, we have things to do and people to see, so we went ahead and automated the factory. The Word-o-Mats runs tirelessly day and night, manufacturing words for the factory, the Bin Bots with them take charge of ferrying the words from the Word-o-Mats to the sorted bins on the other side of the factory. From there other bots build sentences and transfer them into the new works of literature under constant production.
Drop in to the Literature Factory at Kula 2 (189,9,25).Labels: second life
posted by Helen Whitehead 2:06 PM
Monday, 13 August 2007
Season of Inspiration online writing course
I'm really excited to be teaching a new Season of Inspiration writing course in October.
This will be the fifth time Sharon Rundle and I have taught this course together over several years. We work brilliantly together online, yet we met for the first time in real life only a couple of months ago (which was a real treat). She works from the Hunter Valley in Australia. That's what I love about online learning!
Our students have come from the UK, Australia, USA and a few from other countries across the world. All nationalities welcome (although the course is taught in English so you have to be reasonably fluent).
Season of Inspiration
9-week online writing course. Starts 8th October 2007 for 9 weeks.
Join us in making the most of seasonal colours and scents, metaphors of the season, place and time to provide inspiration for writing that'll see you through the rest of the year. We offer support, exercises and creative bolstering. You'll experiment with and collaborate in haiku walks, visual writing, meaningful journalling and capturing the sights and sounds of the season. Dip in and rediscover your creativity. Previous students will find all-new materials, and new students are very welcome.
info@newmediawriting.com
http://www.newmediawriting.com
The techie details - we'll be using Moodle :)Labels: season of inspiration, writing courses
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:09 AM
Wednesday, 8 August 2007
Community cycling...
I've just found out that my local Freecycle group has changed affiliation. They are now part of Realcycle. The local group has left the Freecycle network for a variety of reasons indicative of a breakdown of community. I can see Freecycle's point of view - they want to "upgrade" the community to a centralised network. It's fairly inevitable that they will lose people on the way - it's a natural consequence - not everyone will agree with the ethos of the new community.
Groups that do not agree have every right to split off and find their own way. I must say I do also see the local group's points as well. A concept that started in America is probably not going to be right for British communities in the end.For community managers it is a message to manage volunteers very carefully. If you give the members ownership of their community, then they must be consulted and a democratic process must take place. If policies and structures are imposed then individuals and groups must feel free to reject them by rejecting the whole concept.
The departing group say:
- Many moderators are concerned about the recent Freecycle response to the DEFRA invitation. We do not believe that Freecycle UK should adopt a political stance other than its own remit to keep landfill waste down.
- Those moderators, who stated their wish that the Directors ofFreecycleUK should not take it upon themselves to put forward views that purport to represent the UK Freecycle membership (currently at 770,000), have been ignored.
- Freecycle is currently developing a new website. It is widely believed that this new website will centralise Freecycle groups so that the community aspect is diluted or even lost altogether. There may be no local point of contact, i.e. local moderators.
We are told that the transition to the new website will be entirely voluntary. Perhaps in the beginning, yes, but Freecycle will eventually insist that all groups migrate from their current Yahoo platform to the new site or lose their listing on the directory.- Throughout the Freecycle global community any moderators who question or offer an alternative viewpoint have found themselves on permanent moderation on Freecycle discussion groups or even had their groups taken from them.
- Freecycle is in a state of disarray and confusion at the present time. Many groups have been locked down, moderators removed from their groups (bear in mind that all mods give their time voluntarily and many have spent several years building up their groups in order to benefit their community) and there is no one central source of information.
- TFN's (The Freecycle Network) main sponsor in the U.S. is a company called Waste Management Inc. This company has, in the past been guilty of (and fined for) several incidents involving the illegal dumping of toxic waste.
- Possible breaches of YahooGroups terms of service.
Labels: freecycle, local communities, online communities, online community, realcycle, sustainability
posted by Helen Whitehead 3:50 PM
Tuesday, 7 August 2007
Uses of wikis in education
Contrary to the usual practice on a blog, I am going to use this post to assemble links to published papers, resources, etc. on the subject of wikis. (This may in fact be more of a wiki-type activity itself, except that I am the only person contributing.)
This post will therefore change as links and resources are added.
McAlpine, M. (2007) The use of Wikis for Assessing Collaborative Learner Achievement Proceedings for 11th CAA Conference 2007
Phoebe Project. A practitioner-focused environment to support design for learning, Phoebe is a prototype online tool designed to encourage teachers in colleges and universities to explore new approaches and tools in their pedagogy. (A wiki based tool for designing a learning session.) From Oxford University
http://phoebe-app.conted.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/
Augar, N., Raitman, R. & Zhou, W. (2004). Teaching and learning online with wikis. In R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer & R. Phillips (Eds), Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference (pp. 95-104). Perth, Australia. 5-8 December. Accessed August 2007 http://www.ascilite.org.au/.../augar.html
PDF READ
"In an attempt to remedy the lack of interaction noted in online discussion groups in previous years, a traditional icebreaker exercise used in classroom situated tutorials at Deakin University was adapted for use on a wiki"
Bergin, J. (2002) Teaching on the Wiki Web. In Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (pp. 192-195). Aarhus, Denmark. 24-28 June 2002 ISBN:1-58113-499-1 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=637610.544473 (abstract only not full text)
Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis, 2006, Odense, Denmark 21-23 August 2006 ISBN:1-59593-413-8 http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?...=88179999 (abstract only not full text)Hao-Chuan Wang, Chun-Hung Lu, Jun-Yi Yang, Hsin-Wen Hu, Guey-Fa Chiou, Yuch-Tzu Chiang, Wen-Lian Hsu : Inst. of Inf. Sci., Acad. Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; An empirical exploration of using Wiki in an English as a second language course Advanced Learning Technologies, 2005. ICALT 2005. Fifth IEEE International Conference on
Publication Date: 5-8 July 2005, p 155- 157, ISBN: 0-7695-2338-2
Accessed August 2007 from http://iasl.iis.sinica.edu.tw/...Course.pdf
Their finding of a significant, but inverse, relation between students' editing usage and academic performance challenges some idealistic hypotheses that Wiki technology is "naturally beneficial" to learning. They believe that building an instructive or constructive instructional model with Wiki in a rigorous manner requires more empirical evidence.Desilets, A. and Paquet, S., Wiki as a tool for Webbased collaborative story telling in primary school: A case study.
Forte, A.; Bruckman, A. From Wikipedia to the classroom: exploring online publication and learning, Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences, Bloomington, Indiana, p.182 - 188, June 27-July 1 2006, ISBN:0-8058-6174-2 http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?...27
In Proceedings of Ed-Media 2005, (Montreal, Canada, June 27-July 2, 2005). Retrieved August 2007 from https://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/...NRC-48234.pdf
Interesting look at how primary aged children can create a collaborative hypertext story, with enough detail for tech-savvy teachers to use for themselves. READ
Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/forte-bruckman-icls06.pdf
READ "suggest that collaborative publishing on a wiki offers an interesting model for creating authentic classroom writing activities and can be a powerful tool for constructing knowledge."
Parker, Kevin R., Chao, Joseph T., Wiki as a Teaching Tool,
Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, Volume 3, 2007, p. 57-72 Retrieved August 2007 from
http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p057-072Parker284.pdf
READ "Reflective learning requires structured approaches that enable students to reflect upon their learning and to understand their own learning processes. An essential part of reflective learning is that learners should be encouraged to reflect on their knowledge and make it explicit. Wikis allow this reflection to be done collaboratively, moving closer to a fully social constructivist mode of learning."
Boulos, M.N.K., Maramba, I., & Wheeler, S. (2006). Wikis, blogs and podcasts: A new generation of Webbased tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education, BMC Medical Education, 6(41).
Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6920-6-41.pdf
"Wikis in particular actively involve learners in their own construction of knowledge" in a study of virtual collaborative clinical practice and education.
Schaffert, S., Bischof, D., Buerger, T., Gruber, A., Hilzensauer, W. & Schaffert, S. (2006). Learning with semantic wikis. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Semantic Wikis - From Wiki To Semantics (SemWiki2006), Budva, Montenegro: June 11-14, 109-123. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.wastl.net/...SemWikiLearning.pdf
"The collaborative features of wikis make them particularly well suited for cooperative
learning environments"
Schwartz, L., Clark, S., Cossarin, M. & Rudolph, J. (2004). ISSN: 1492-3831 Technical Evaluation Report 27. Educational wikis: Features and selection criteria.
International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 5(1). Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/163/692 (PDF)
http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/163/244 (web) READ "wikis can provide an efficient, flexible, user friendly and cost-effective interface for collaboration, knowledge creation and archiving, and student interaction."
Leuf, B. and Cunningham, W. (2001), The Wiki Way: Quick collaboration on the web. Boston:
Addison Wesley.
creators of the original wiki concept
Godwin-Jones, R. (2003). Blogs and wikis: Environments for on-line collaboration. [Electronic
Version]. Language, Learning and Technology, 7(2), 12-16.
suggests that wikis may be ideal for building communities of practice by creating a collective repository of expertise in a subject area, which is refined over time by the contributions and problem-solving of interested individuals. It is this function that distinguishes communities of practice from other online communities, such as chat groups or bulletin boards. See also PROWE project
De Pedro, X., Rieradevall, M., Lopez, P., Sant, D., Pinol, J., Nunez, L., et al. (2006). Writing documents collaboratively in Higher education (I): Qualitative results from a 2-year project study. Congreso Internacional de Docencia Universitaria e Innovacion (International Congress of University Teaching and Innovation), Barcelona: July 5-7. Retrieved August 2007 from
http://uniwiki.ourproject.org/...Congressos
Wikis enhance asynchronous communication and cooperative learning among students, and promote cooperation rather than competition
Reinhold, S. (2006). WikiTrails: Augmenting wiki structure for collaborative, interdisciplinary learning. Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, Odense, Denmark: August 21-23, 47-58.
Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p47.pdf
Wikis will facilitate not only communication but also the collaborative finding, shaping, and sharing of knowledge, all of which are essential properties in an educational context.
Mader, S. (Ed.) (2006). Using wiki in education, a wiki-based book (some chapters free, some fee-based). Retrieved August 2007 at
http://www.wikiineducation.com
Mader, S. (2006). Ways to use wiki in education. Retrieved August 2007 from
http://www.wikiineducation.com/...education
Fountain, R. (2005). Wiki pedagogy. Dossiers technopedagogiques. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.profetic.org/dossiers/...110
Website with some interesting examples
Duffy, P. & Bruns, A. (2006). The use of blogs, wikis and RSS in education: A conversation of possibilities. Proceedings of the Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, Brisbane: September 26. Retrieved August 2007 from
https://olt.qut.edu.au/...Duffy_OLT2006_paper.pdf
READ Lists 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.
• Students can add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings, building a
collaborative annotated bibliography on a wiki.
• 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.
• Teachers can use wikis as a knowledge base, enabling them to share reflections and
thoughts regarding teaching practices, and allowing for versioning and documentation.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
Naish, R. (2006). Can wikis be useful for learning? e.learning Age. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.qiconcepts.co.uk/pdf/C...earning.pdf
Describes icebreakers
Lamb, Brian. (2004). Wide open spaces: Wikis, ready or not. EDUCAUSE Review, 39(5) (September/October), 36-48. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.educause.edu/....bhcp=1
Describes using wikis for writing instruction
Wikipedia (2007) School and University Projects Retrieved August 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....projects
Bruns, A. & Humphreys, S. (2005). Wikis in teaching and assessment: The M/Cyclopedia project. Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis, San Diego, CA, U.S.A.: October 16-18, 25-32. Retrieved August 2007 from
http://snurb.info/files...Assessment.pdf
In a new media technologies course, students developed the M/Cyclopedia (Media/Culture), a wiki-based encyclopedic collection of information on new media concepts and topics. The wiki was also used for student interactions, discussions and coordination outside the official tasks.
Lund, A. & Smordal, O. (2006). Is there a space for the teacher in a wiki? Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, Odense, Denmark: August 21-23, 37-46. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.wikisym.org/.../p37.pdf
Discusses ideas of letting the learners co-construct subject entries in an encyclopedia.
Chen, H.L., Cannon, D., Gabrio, J. Leifer, L. Toye, G. & Bailey, T. (2005). Using wikis and weblogs to support reflective learning in an introductory engineering design course. Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon: June 12-15. Retrieved August 2007 from
http://riee.stevens.edu/....._and_Weblogs.pdf
A pedagogical challenge common in project-based courses is that students see what they have produced but they do not see what they have learned. A wiki helps solve this.
Seitzinger, J. (2006). Be constructive: Blogs, podcasts, and wikis as constructivist learning tools. Learning Solutions e-Magazine. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.elearningguild.com/pdf/2/073106DES.pdf
provides a thorough discussion of the benefits of constructivist online learning environments
Hamer, J. (2006). Some experiences with the "contributing student approach". Proceedings of the 11th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE’06), Bologna, Italy: June 26-28, 68-72. Retrieved August 2007 from
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1140123.1140145 (abstract only not full text)
Betty Collis' contributing student approach
Chang, Y.-F. & Schallert, D.L. (2005). The design for a collaborative system of English as foreign language: Composition writing of senior high school students in Taiwan. Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’05), Kaohsiung, Taiwan: July 5-8, 774-775. Retrieved August 2007 from
http://portal.acm.org/cita...18 (abstract only not full text)
Honegger, B.D. (2005). Wikis – a rapidly growing phenomenon in the German-speaking school community. Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis, San Diego, CA, USA: October 16-18, 113-116. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.wikisym.org/ws2005/proceedings/paper-10.pdf
Notari, M. (2006). How to use a wiki in education: Wiki based effective constructive learning. Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, Odense, Denmark: August 21–23, 131-132. Retrieved August 2007 from http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p131.pdf READ
This paper asserts that collaboration is less likely to be a success without proper guidance,
such as a script.
Pearce, J. (2007). Using wiki in education. The science of spectroscopy. Retrieved August 2007, from http://www.scienceofspectroscopy.info/...wiki_in_education.
Interesting website READ
Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut: the movie an illustration of the growth of a wiki page over time
Ebner, M., Zechner, J., Holzinger, A. (2006) Why is Wikipedia so Successful? Experiences in Establishing the Principles in Higher Education, Proceedings of I-KNOW 06, 6th International Conference on Knowlegde Management, Graz, Austria, S. 527-535, ISSN 0948-695x Draft accessed August 2007 at http://lamp.tu-graz.ac.at/...iknow.pdf
READ Trying to use Wikipedia paradigm: Unsuccessful wiki in creating an encyclopedia of concrete due to lack of motivation (using "free time"), and community feeling and inertia (new technology and environment). "Learners usually consume the learning content and are generally not interested in creating it on a voluntary basis."Labels: e-learning, elearning, wiki-tivities, wikis, wikitivities
posted by Helen Whitehead 12:03 PM
Monday, 6 August 2007
$100 laptop production begins
A low-cost laptop, designed for children in developing countries, finally goes into mass production report the BBC
Intel have joined in the consortium - until quite recently they were producing the "Classmate" PC as a rival - possibly without the altruistic intent of the $100 laptop scheme.Labels: $100 laptop, laptop, sustainability
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:02 AM
Saturday, 4 August 2007
E-books on online community
Useful resources, especially for beginners
Otis Online Tutoring e-Book
NCSL's e-learning facilitation toolkit and 70,000 heads are better than oneLabels: e-learning, e-moderating, e-moderation, e-moderator, ebook, elearning, emoderating, online communities, online community, online learning, online tutor, online tutoring
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:53 PM
Friday, 3 August 2007
Join me on the Creativity in E-Learning network
Labels: creativity, e-learning, education sector, elearning, FE, HE, learning and teaching, learning technologies, social networking, universities, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 4:06 PM
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Levels of Technology/Web/VLE Use in Teaching and Learning
1 Administrative
Syllabi, submission dates, room allocations, last-minute changes, etc.
2 Supplemental
Materials to support the traditional classroom, but not critical to the course (e.g. notes, handouts, slides, reading lists, Internet links).
3 Essential
Students require regular web access to be productive members of the class. Most materials, tasks, assessments available on website. Teachers require ICT literacy and sufficient course development time.
4 Communal
Course website used for communication purposes. Much course content generated through asynchronous discussions, real-time chats, publication of documents, audio and video-conferencing. ‘Design for e-learning’ expertise and e-moderating skills needed.
Blended courses need go no further than this.
5 Immersive
No classroom-based teaching. Courses are taught online.
(with acknowledgment to Dr Ale Armellini)Labels: learning and teaching, learning technologies, levels of transition, VLE, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:51 AM
Wednesday, 1 August 2007
Great blog widgets
I've been looking up some good blog widgets.
You can see a few of them in the sidebars to this blog.
Mood display
http://www.imood.com/
Librarything to display a random sample of books from your library
http://www.librarything.com/
Provide a translation of your blog on demand... (Wordpress only: not tried)
http://trevorcreech.com/blog/2006/04/27/translate-widget/Embed your Flickr photos
http://flickrslidr.com/Or use Slide.com to create a slideshow of photos
http://www.slide.com/Get a cartoon updated daily! from Gaping Void
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002978.html
and lots from http://www.widgetbox.com/
including turning your own blog into a widget - that is, a BLIDGET! (I have my blog as a widget on my website at helenwhitehead.com)
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:18 AM
