Mediating PBL in a Wiki environment (cont’d)
What One Can Do With Wikis
Wikis, by contrast, are simple and largely free. Yet they can enable facilitators to measure processes and let students communicate, coordinate and collaborate on the same platform. They also enable collaborative knowledge construction and communication around explicit representations, as Ostwald (1996) has recommended for knowledge-intensive domains.
A wiki is basically a collaborative workspace of Web pages. Depending on the specific wiki tool, almost anyone visiting a wiki page with a browser such as Internet Explorer can easily add, amend and organize the content as they see fit. They can also easily add comments, new wiki pages, images (such as photos, graphics and output from concept mapping or modeling tools) as well as links to other wiki pages or external Web pages. All wiki changes are automatically logged and versioned, and any change deemed unfit can be reversed at the click of a button. As Davies (2004) put it, “the system is essentially self-regulating… [and] data on a wiki has a survival-of-the-fittest, evolutionary feel.”
Arreguin (2004) also reported, “Wikis provide unique collaborative opportunities for education… wikis are being rapidly adopted as an innovative way of constructing knowledge… [It is] helpful to construct wiki problems that offer multiple solutions, ensuring continued dialog and collaborative problem solving among students… the teacher only posting comments, questions or suggestions when absolutely necessary…. wikis allow students to ‘own’ their learning experiences.”
Wiki Experiments So Far
Personally, I have experimented with the use of wikis over the past months with moderate success:
- Since August 05, three of my colleagues and I have been using MediaWiki to plan and schedule training sessions, as well as make team updates. We are still using the wiki.
- In September – November 04, two friends and I used MediaWiki to compile evidence and then debate opposing viewpoints around the evidence.
- In February 05, a lecturer and I jointly launched a Web exploration and compilation exercise on TikiWiki among a class of around 20. The response was overwhelming.
Worldwide wiki-based projects so far seems to have yielded quite mixed results – ranging from the wildly successful Wikipedia (with over 200,000 users contributing to half a million articles and around 50 million hits a day) to Payne’s (2003) moderately successful wiki-based collaboration and Davies’ (2004) unsuccessful implementation of a wiki for asynchronous distributed brainstorming among lecturers and students of a course.
In a interview (Faludi, 2005) at a conference, founder Jimmy Wales attributed the success of Wikipedia to a social and design innovation rather than a technological innovation He reinforced the vaguely-known wisdom that “motivated people will collaborate with whatever tools they have” and that “the thing that makes a thriving system is the project”.
Payne reported that over two-thirds of the students said that the wiki was very useful to them throughout the semester, in particular, in managing projects, as well as discussion of test cases, grading details and general questions. Davies, on the other hand, noted that feedback after the study revealed that the users saw no value in the exercise: that they “won’t benefit from inputting”.
