Using wiki in education

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1 What is a wiki?
2 Courses using Wiki
3 Wiki Tools
4 Wiki-related Links
5 Wiki demo videos
6 Universities using Wiki

What is a wiki?

A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be "rolled back" if necessary.

The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person's course web site (excerpt from my contribution to a Business 2.0 article --Stewart.mader 11:35, 14 Dec 2005 (PST))

Q. How many Wiki people does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. One, but anyone can change it back. -langreiter.com

"The New Writing is online writing: designing web sites, writing weblogs, and creating and managing wikis. New writers are redefining writing online, creating new forms and approaches for new audiences." - English Dept., Bemidji State University

Courses using Wiki

BIOL 414/614: Eukaryotic Genetics And Molecular Biology Biology course at UMBC using a wiki as course web site. Here's an assignment asking students to research a topic in current literature and present their analysis to a scientifically informed lay audience on a wiki page. Taught by Dr. Philip Farabaugh
Blogs and Wikis - a course on blogs and wikis in the English Dept. at Bemidji State University
PY55 Introduction to Sleep Brown University
Wikis in PY0055 - Mary Carskadon, PhD, course instructor: In past years, students in PY0055 (Introduction to Sleep) have kept track of their sleep throughout the semester, turning in their information by completing a form passed around during class time. This information was entered into an excel file each week by a teaching assistant who then prepared a figure of the data to be used as feedback to the class the following week. When the class size is large (150 or so), this data entry becomes prohibitively time intensive. This semester, Stewart Mader worked with me to create a Wiki site where students could enter their own data each week. A TA then downloaded the data from the Wiki into an excel file, made the figure, and so forth. Thus, the data entry task was distributed to the students, which not only liberated TA time but also gave students the opportunity to learn more about data collection. A second project that was accomplished with a Wiki this year was for a problem set in which students kept a dream diary and then prepared data based on their own diary. They then prepared hypotheses about the classâ€™s dream data. In past years, we have brought the class data to the course with considerable difficulty, since all the data was entered into an excel file by a TA. These data include responses to approximately 40 questions, clearly a major data acquisition and entry task. The Wiki that Stewart Mader prepared for this exercise made it possible for students to enter their own data, which could then be assembled for class feedback. These two Wikis took a bit of practice for students to use efficiently, and the start up was not 100% intuitive. Given that it was a new initiative for the class and for the computer folks, the Wikis worked quite well.
PY111 Personality and Clinical Assessment Brown University
Wiki use in PY111 - Theresa DiDonato, course TA: This past semester I was the TA for a laboratory course in personality psychology. As part of the course, students were periodically asked to collect data from their peers using questionnaires designed to study different phenomena. Although we had a small enrollment, 16, we soon discovered that data organization and management posed an interesting problem. In order to conduct analyses, we needed all the studentsâ€™ data compiled into one excel spreadsheet, but as part of the course, we wanted each student to have the experience of collecting and entering his or her own data. Further, because this course met only once a week, we needed to be able to compile the data quickly, over the course of 2 or 3 days. For our first lab, students gathered their data independently and entered it into their own excel worksheet. They then emailed their data to me, and I compiled and organized it all by cutting and pasting from their spreadsheets into a master spreadsheet. This was an inefficient and messy procedure. Mistakes were easy to make during each step of the process. First, my email account became clogged with the onslaught of data files that were sent my way. Second, not every student organized his or her spreadsheet in the same way, despite the fact that we gave each one a template to follow, so I had to fix them before I could use them. Third, my master file needed to contain data values that each student computed in their spreadsheets from their raw data; thus, I needed to cut and â€œpaste specialâ€ such that I reproduced in my document only the values they computed, and not the equations that were hidden in their spreadsheets. Since each person collected data from more than one individual, compiling it became a time intensive and arduous process fraught with error. The email traffic alone warranted a new method, so I consulted with Stewart Mader who suggested we use a â€œWikiâ€ for data entry. This interface seemed perfect for our problem; it would allow multiple students to enter data at the same time into one spreadsheet which could later be exported and downloaded as an excel document. No more email! No more cutting and pasting! We decided to try using a Wiki for Lab 2, a laboratory assignment that required each person to collect data from themselves and a peer. Never having used a Wiki before, and certainly never having introduced it as a means of data collection in a classroom, I was a bit nervous about how well it would go over with students and how smoothly the process would work. I presented the new method to the students during our seminar, and we allowed time at the end of class for data entry. After I explained the basics, students went to the classroomâ€™s computers and began inputting their data. I paced around the classroom, waiting for a question or some confusion, but to my amazement, the entire process went entirely flawlessly. I think part of its success can be credit to the fact that students are used to technology, and the wiki capitalizes on the strengths of its audience by having an easy-to-understand user interface. Itâ€™s intuitive, and the students had no problem figuring out how to navigate through it, input new data, and edit data they had already entered. In a matter of minutes, they were done. It was amazing. What would have taken me at least 3 hours of opening emails, downloading files, fixing formatting, cutting and pasting, checking my work, and emailing the master file back to the students, took less than 15 minutes. Students were happy as well; one group remembered how easy the wiki made data collection when they began their final project. I think they noticed that the wiki has potential for making collaboration easy by removing the back-and-forth process, eliminating the errors that are usually inherent in the simultaneous editing of one file on different computers, and preventing the mistakes that typically arise when one person is in charge of compiling many files. This vast improvement over our prior organizational method makes our introduction to the wiki a favorite outcome of this past semester. We will surely use the wiki in future offerings of this particular laboratory course, and I definitely plan to use it in other laboratory classes Iâ€™m involved in as well.
Teaching Social Software with Social Software: A report Ulises Ali Mejias writes about a graduate course he taught at Teachers College, Columbia University, in which social software tools (blog, wiki, rss) were used to teach students how to use and critically evaluate social software.
English 15 Rhetoric and Composition one of three required core courses in Rhetoric at Penn State University uses a wiki for students to blog about their experiences during the class, develop ideas for their writing projects, and benefit from community input. There's even a section where students can leave advice for the next group to take the class, which leads me to another point - one of the best things about a wiki is that it is ongoing, and can be used for multiple semesters of a course, allowing students to see what others have done, and to add their contributions to something larger than what would otherwise be an isolated, one semester experience.
The Collaborative Writing Project - SUNY Geneseo. Administered by Paul Schacht, Department of English. I created this wiki in Fall 2005 to enable students in my classes to do various types of collaborative writing. In my section of Intd 105, Critical Writing and Reading (required for all first-year Geneseo students), we studied the social history of Christmas in America. I put up the text of Clement Clark Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (aka "'Twas the Night Before Christmas") and asked my students to "annotate" the poem by creating explanatory pages linked to key words and phrases in the poem. In addition, I offered students the opportunity to collaborate on an article about Moore's poem in place of one of the six assigned papers in the course. Participants (18 of 22 students enrolled in the class decided to join) received grades partly reflecting their individual contributions and partly reflecting the quality of the "finished" product, for which they were collectively accountable. In Spring 2006, my students in English 315, Victorian Literature, gave oral reports throughout the semester; students followed up their reports by posting entries to an Annotated Bibliography of Victorian Literature built by linking each citation in the bibliography to a page summarizing the article or essay cited. My Spring 2006 students in English 170, The Practice of Criticism, built a Dictionary of Literary Terms that served them as a quick reference during the semester and a study guide for the final exam. Although my courses are the only ones presently represented at the Collaborative Writing Project, I've been working hard to interest colleagues in populating the site with their students' work. In the fall, one colleague in my department may ask his students to collaborate on a chapter-by-chapter summary of Djuna Barnes' difficult modernist novel Nightwood. Another plans to augment the "Dictionaries" area of the wiki by having his students start a Dictionary of Geneseo slang - a kind of urbandictionary.com of the local lingo.
Introductory Physics I and Introductory Physics II at Eckerd College. An experiment to create a collaborative formula sheet using a wiki