Midterm

Our midterm in EDUC 762 is a collaborative activity. I have been paired with 3 other classmates (we are Group 3) and I will be researching wiki as assessment.
Below is a very rough draft of my participation.
Click on my wiki to see a formatted version - click here.
Greg Pratt
EDUC 762
Group 3
Peer to Peer Collaboration/Wiki
Spring 2008
Introduction to wiki, its uses & benefits
Introduction
According to Bernie Dodge (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/necc2004/blogs-and-wikis.htm) wikis were developed in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. The word means quick in Hawaiian. Cunningham's definition of a a wiki is the simplest online database that could possibly work. The archetypal wiki is Wikipedia, a collaborative effort with over a quarter million entries. Wikis allow open editing. Setting on the wiki can allow anyone can edit anyone else's writing, or undo a previous edit. This leads to a shared ownership of the collected work. To experience this, you can add an entry to Wikipedia or set up your own free wikispace on any of a number of wiki sites. If you have sufficient geek experience you can install your own wiki software on a server running Linux or Mac OS X. Most are open source.

Uses

In “Using Wikis for Summative and Formative Assessment” Marija Cubric outlines the following uses for wiki in instructional settings:

• Add (referenced) contribution to the weekly topic analysis
• Add definition to a topic discussion
• Review an article/web-site/standard relative to the topic
• Complete a practical task
• Develop essay
• Review the work of your colleague and provide comments

Her list reveals a dual nature of wiki, there is potential for academic skill development in writing, critical thinking, and other above the course level outcomes that learning institutions strive to achieve. At the same time, wiki provide a vehicle to develop collaborative skills and develop facility in the use of appropriate instructional technology for task completion.
Emma Tonkin in “Making the Case for Wiki” presents the uses for wiki in a broader context. She describes the following wiki uses:
Single-user Wikis
Talking to yourself may well be the first sign of madness, but what about writing to yourself? At first sight, it seems peculiar to imagine a single author making good use of a wiki. Wikis are collaborative environments, after all - or they're fast flexible multi-user web development platforms. What can one person do with a wiki?
• Brainstorming in the form of a wikiweb, which she describes as a concept map in wiki page.Or, rephrased, what on earth is the good of wiki software for a handheld or PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)?
• a single user wiki is a marvellous way of collecting and presenting information over a period of time.
Lab Book
Students requiring a place to keep an online lab book or research notebook are in much the same situation as the 'single user' jotting down brainstorming ideas, except for a number of details:
• The students may wish to create an index and entries cross-referenced by date and by content.
• Page export facilities in various forms are useful, if not necessary; for example, if the student can export their completed pages as a well typeset PDF document, the results can easily be used and shared in a variety of scenarios, or even bound into a book and used as a permanent record.
Collaborative Writing
Wikis are available online, for anybody granted access, and usually include the vital versioning information that allows authors to track the history of their documents. They appear to be an ideal platform for collaborative authorship, and indeed certain projects such as the Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, have proved to be entirely successful.
Wikis destined for collaborative writing should therefore include:
• a page locking system
• a versioning system
• the ability to temporarily remove the edit functionality for a given page
Knowledge Base
Any good learning community needs to retain their experiences somewhere, and a wiki makes a reasonably good knowledge base.
My teammate Patrick M pointed me to the online journal The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. In a 2005 analysis of wiki the authors of this article conclude: “The wiki has clear potential in distance education, allowing users to brainstorm ideas with an unlimited number of people around the world, and to collaborate with them in exchanging files and developing webpages.” They go to articulate both a use and a benefit of wiki when they write: “It is hoped that an increasing number of educators will encourage their students to develop the simple online editing and sharing skills that make wikis useful.”
Benefits
Linda Schwartz, Sharon Clark, Mary Cossarin, and Jim Rudolph in a 2004 article from the previously mentioned online journal outline a number of benefits arguing that “wikis can provide an efficient, flexible, user friendly and cost-effective interface for collaboration, knowledge creation and archiving, and student interaction. Lack of standardized formatting across wiki programs makes WYSIWYG editing attractive. The need for minimal technical skills allows users to concentrate on content rather than on the technical process of writing, and reduces the need for student support.”
In Corporate Wiki Users: Results of a Survey Ann Majchrzak et al reported that a survey of 168 corporate wiki users disclosed three main types of benefits from corporate wikis: enhanced reputation, work made easier, and helping theorganization to improve its processes. These benefits were seen as more likely when the wiki was used for tasks requiring novel solutions and the information posted was from credible sources.

Cubric prefaced her analysis of the benefits of wiki by saying “Regarding the theoretical foundation of this work, it is obvious that wiki is a textbook example of constructivist tool for learning . . . “ Among the benefits she lists (see Appendix for full analysis) are just-in-time learning, “structured dialogue” via learning, and a movement toward “connective” writing. An interesting finding asserted that wiki help student employability by preparing them for teamwork, global audience and peer reviews and in general for the new business model where “collaboration is the expectation rather than exception”
Weaknesses & challenges of wiki as an assessment tool
Jeremiah Owyang outlined the following wiki weaknesses at his blog site
To me, public wikis are one of the most problematic of all the social tools. I’ve created, managed, or been part of several public wikis, and as soon as they get popular, they get vandalized. The challenge is that turning over that much control over to the crowd gives one person nearly 90% control of the content. Sure, you can revert it but it becomes a cat and mouse game. I deployed the industry wiki for the Data Storage Industry, and we had to lock it, and hand out keys to trusted members of the community due to vandalism, same with the ScobleShow wiki, which is permanently disabled. Wikipedia? Same thing. In my frustration, I wrote this piece on the problem with wikis is people.
Other weaknesses and challenges of wiki surfaced in our class include the unfamiliar format, the somewhat crude and confusing interface or view, the difficulty in attribution of authorship and time requirement. While this participant in our class revised their opinion, their first impression of wiki was: “In my initial assessment of the wiki earlier this week, I absolutely hated it, and wanted nothing to do with it. Because of it's minimalist-looking webpage, I was turned off from the very beginning, and it didn't look very user-friendly.” So what was accurately described as a “minimalist page was an initial turn off. This may pose a significant challenge to the generation of learners raised on high levels of participant controlled functionality that is aesthetically under the control of the individual. Another participant in the same class writes on our discussion board about wiki: “What happens if more than one person is making an edit to the same content in a Wiki? Common sense tells me that whoever clicks save most recent gets their changes posted on the Wiki. Where this confuses me is if I am spending a great deal of time modifying information in a Wiki, only to realize someone else overrides it...this could end up in much wasted time.” This latter concern “wasted effort” would effectively block the efficicacy of wiki.
The issue of time required is clearly a barrier or cost to the use of wiki. An innovator in the use of social networks in composition instruction writes: “I can think of other reasons for not rushing to accept social networking apps. The main one is time. I have my students using blogs, wikis, and RSS now. And I've been wanting to start incorporating podcasts and videos. But to learn how to use them (some of my students do use them, which is great!) effectively in my classes, I just don't have the time” (http://secondlanguagewriting.com/explorations/Archives/2007/August/HypefromtheMediaandfromW.html)
A member of Group 3, my collaborative group for this midterm activity writes on the E Learning for Educators blog: “Do you see wiki as an example of authenticity in activity or assessment? No as it is too uncontrolled for my taste and comfort level.”
Finally, one of my colleagues in my midterm collaborate group wrote: “I would emphasize to my students that most of what is posted in wikis could be unverified.” This is perhaps the most frequently raised objection to wiki.
Examples of application of wiki in an online classroom.
Below are a list of applications for wiki in online classrooms. I would argue that perhaps the strongest set of applications involve the writing process and the publication process. My colleague at Mesa Community College, Shelley Rodrigo, English faculty and Instructional Technologist wrote on January 7, 2008 on E Learning for Educators: “Peer review of writing projects in a wiki is always interesting. Using the page history is helpful for both the student to learn from their classmates as well as my tracking of student work. I also like having students co-develop resource pages using a wiki.”
• Add (referenced) contribution to the weekly topic analysis
• Add definition to a topic discussion
• Review an article/web-site/standard relative to the topic
• Complete a practical task
• Develop essay
• Review the work of your colleague and provide comments
• Brainstorming
• Lab book
• Collaborative writing

At least one learning objective connected to the use wiki.
Clearly a number of learning objectives can be both articulated, taught and assessed via wiki. The most common general area seems to involve writing. One learning objective that might be taught and assessed online would be to have an original work of academic writing be revised by both the author and a classmate. Thinking back to Shelley Rodrigo’s comments, it seems that an increased quantity, quality, and process as measured by revision in the writing process may be connected to the use of wiki.