Wiki as a Teaching Tool

Abstract

Wikis are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the learning process. A wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment. This paper explains wiki usage, investigates its contribution to various learning paradigms, examines the current literature on wiki use in education, and suggests additional uses in teaching software engineering.

Using a wiki to evaluate individual contribution to a collaborative learning project

“…The literature reports many experiences in the educational use of wikis (Byron 2005;Notari 2006;Parker & Chao 2007). Several of these have addressed the problem of evaluating the contents that students have developed and the level of learning/competences reached in developing them (Bruns & Humphreys 2005;Hamer 2006).…”

“…Online activities now can benefit greatly from the enormous possibilities offered by social software (Malloch 2005;Alexander 2006). These include wikis, which are characterized by a variety of unique and powerful information-sharing and collaboration features that offer key advantages, such as allowing learners to be actively involved in their own knowledge construction (Boulos et al 2006), as well as improving co-writing processes (Parker & Chao 2007) and facilitating their monitoring. For example, some of these affordances include the possibility • to implement distributed collaborative writing (Lowry et al 2004a); and • to exploit some embedded wiki functions (versioning, tags, comments, linkers) to support the monitoring of both the students' activities and their level of contribution to the collaborative work.…”

Facilitating Collaborative Learning Using Online Wikis: Evaluation of Their Application Within Postgraduate Psychology Teaching

“…This is not without problem, though; Wang and Turner (2004) suggest that modification to wiki technology might be necessary before it can be widely integrated into curricula. Whilst lacking a substantive empirical basis for their usage, further development of wikis as a teaching aid is encouraged, particularly as a tool to encourage innovative thought (Al-Khalifa, 2008) or collaborative learning (Nordin & Koblas, 2009;Parker & Chao, 2007;Wheeler, Yeomans, & Wheeler, 2008) and especially within the health and allied sciences (Boulos, Maramba, & Wheeler, 2006).…”

Wiki-mediated Writing: design, media, writing strategies and feedback in online text production

“…In this context, a wiki is considered as a teaching tool that is in particular connected to collaboration and active student engagement, and as facilitating socio-constructivist learning (Désilets & Paquet, 2005;Parker & Chao, 2007;Karasavvidis, 2010). In addition to discussions regarding the suitability of Wikipedia as a source for student research, collaborative writing and collective learning activities form the educational areas mostly connected to the use of wikis in education.…”