Few people today are unaware of
Wikipedia, and many are
aware of the various controversies surrounding it: "How accurate is it?" "Should
students be using it as a research tool?"
There is, if not a consensus, then at least a commonly held view that wikipedia
can be a very useful tool for students who understand its limitations. As it is
built collaboratively by a large number of volunteers, there is a risk that some
articles may contain errors, especially in the narrower topics. Nevertheless,
the majority of the articles are of surprisingly good quality, as they are
constantly scrutinized by a large community of users.
The large number of contributors also explains another
advantage of wikipedia: the enormous breadth of its scope
and the up-to-date nature of most articles. Resources such
as Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica cannot possibly hope
to compete in terms of currency or wealth of topics. The impact of wikis is the topic of a recent book, "WIKINOMICS - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything", by Don Tapscott.
However, few users consider the technology behind
Wikipedia and the opportunities it can offer for
education. Wikis can be extremely useful tools for some
types of projects, and are in fact not difficult to use.
Here at ISM, all of grade 7 is currently in the middle of
a Social Studies project producing wikis in small groups.
By the end of the first lesson in the lab, they are
comfortably using the software, and can concentrate on
content and logical organisation of the content. It is
considerably easier to learn than traditional web site
design.
But what is a wiki?
A wiki is a website that allows the visitors themselves to "(...) add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring".
(source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki).
Got it? Next, let's look at some features of wikis:
-
One or (preferably) more users can edit the site whenever and whenever
they want. There is no limit to how many users work on the site. The only
limitation is that two users cannot edit the same page at the same time.
- Users don't need
to know HTML code.
- Formatting tools are usually limited, so students end up
spending most of the time focusing on content rather than making it all look
pretty.
- The structure of the whole site can easily represent the logical structure
of the content matter. What does that mean? Well, consider a text with several
complex concepts, e.g. "entropy" and "anthropogenic" and
"oscillation". You could embed long definitions of those terms in the
text, but some readers may already be familiar with the terms and would prefer
not to have to read them or scan for where the text picks up after the definition. Wikis
allow you to turn words or expressions into links, and when the author of the page
then clicks on the link, the wiki software automatically creates a new page
for that term, and the author can insert the treatment of that term on
the separate page. Readers thus have a choice whether to follow links to terms
they are unfamiliar with.
- All users can edit each others' entries. The wiki software stores a
history of each version, and users can restore previous versions in case of
vandalism. There is usually also a facility for discussion in case of disputes
over which version should be kept.
Benefits for education:
- Collaborating with a number of people on a site is exciting and
the project starts taking on a life of its own.
- One reason why wikipedia works so well, even though it relies on voluntary
contributions by users, is that people thrive on respect from their peers. This phenomenon is also at work in the Open
Source Software movement, from which arise such successful products as the
Linux operating system.
- Students can learn a lot from each other, and there are those who say that
schools should aim to emulate the the science lab model (see Carl Bereiter, "Learning to Work Creatively With Knowledge",
p. 13), where a
team of researchers construct a body of shared knowledge. A wiki is a good
tool for building up such a repository of "what we know about the topic so
far", including such points as:
- what we know for sure
- what we suspect, but aren't sure of
- what we know we don't know and need to find out (more about)
- what it all means
- what our hypotheses/theories allow us to do or explain and where they
fall short (e.g. Newtonian physics works fine for everyday tasks on Earth,
but is insufficient when calculating trajectories for space travel)
- As students collaborate, they feed off each others' ideas along the way,
which sparks new ideas, which others can learn from, etc. Thus, the end
product adds up to more than the sum of what each one could have produced on
their own.
Here is a video overview of how to work with a wiki. Please note that you may have to wait a while for the full video to load.
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