Saturday 13 March 2010

how can wiki support teaching and learning

Here, I am going to point out that, besides wikipedia, there are also many useful online wiki pages can be used to facilitate our teaching and learning:
Like PBworks,


it is a “secure online workspace” for users to create, share, contribute to their own or others contents. It is easy to sign in and easy to build a group. So for collaborative projects, it’s a good platform for both teachers and students to contribute on. And, with each student has a unique login and password, you can easily know who made what change. When you need to assess the contribution from students, it could be a good criterion of judgement.

Comparing its editing function with moodle or other discussion forum and blogs, the obvious difference is these wiki pages can be re-edited or modified by any person. And, “generally, wikis have a history function, which allows previous versions to be examined, and a rollback function, which restores previous versions.” So in this aspect, I think wiki is more open access and collaboration-welcome.
(Azalea)

4 comments:

  1. (Azalea)There are several descriptions can clearly reflect the key functions of wiki:

    “wiki is a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information – a database, where each page is easily edited by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client” (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001a)

    “wiki is a webpage or set of webpages that can be easily edited by anyone who is allowed access.” (Ebersbach et al., 2006).

    “wiki can be a collaborative tool that facilitates the production of a group work.” (Paul Anderson)

    From these descriptions, the key functions of wiki can be summarized as below:
    - an easy-to-use online editing tool
    - a community-owned and operated Web site
    - a source of information and knowledge

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  2. (Azalea)For facilitating teaching and learning, "a wiki is a type of groupware that supports asynchronous communications across distances. Such groupware can be used to establish virtual learning spaces, or environments, that facilitate collaboration across time, interruptions, and distance." (Joshua L Mindel, Sameer Verma, 2006)

    resource from the journey - Communications of the Association for Information Systems, (Volume 18, 2006), 1-23,"WIKIS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING"

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  3. I love this resource you provided, Azalea. I've registered in PBworks and tried the major functions available there. Good example of web using Wiki for collabrating learning and teaching.

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  4. I have used PBworks. I found it is quite user friendly. Teachers could uploaded their materials such as embed links and share some learning objects.
    I think PBworks could be easily applied on education. Like just create one folder for each class or subject. Digital generation will like this feature.

    By Real

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