Wednesday, 17 January 2007

Something Wiki this way comes...

We've been experimenting with wikis recently in the University of Plymouth down here in the South West of England. We've been using them since the start of the new term. Only a few weeks in, and already wikis appear to be paying dividends. The students who use them are undergrads and postgrads, and it will be interesting to see if they interact and/or transgress into each other's spaces during editing.

I'm most interested in the dynamics that go on between students when they are creating content and editing each other's work. Ownership seems to be a real issue for some - they quickly realise that once the 'send' button has been pressed, the content is no longer their own, but belongs to the entire learning community, to alter, extend, mix, mashup or delete as they see fit. Its a problem for some, but I guess they will get used to it.... I hope to present a paper (or two) on our findings later in the year, probably at the
EDEN conference, aptly entitled 'New Learning 2.0?' in Naples in June.

In the meantime, we are using two wikis:
epedagogy and IMPOnline.

Check out a really useful (but slightly dated) commentary on wikis at
Using Wiki in Education - it also offers some useful links to previous work and good tips about ways to use wikis in education.

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