Using wiki in education
From RCC 2007
Notes
John Sechrest - OSU: ppl not lrning how to work with each other in traditional academic environment. give big hard messy prob that no one can solve themselves don't ive a cookie cutter problem to every team; give problems that are similar but with diff end results. let each team see others' progress on wiki
coordinate work in wiki - i.e. who does what? teach process of working together while teaching how to solve a problem result is that people go into professional careers knowing how to work with each other, document their work so that it's useful to others in advancing solution to problems.
teaching people to cooperate required breaking habit taught in traditional education. 2 groups bailed from class -
- students who were concerned with getting the 4.0 GPA
- students who felt overwhelmed at first mention of technology
- some ppl didn't participate b/c it was not structured the way they wanted, so they thought it wasn't structured at all
- some ppl tried to float on the outskirts and hide from collaboration
- Group A : ppl who were very smart but not doing well b/c they haven't bought into traditional education ( those otherwise getting B-) excelled the most b/cthey were engaged.
- Group B: another group of ppl who would otherwise be C- students were able to follow the success of Group A and be more successful themselves.
one good learning technique with wiki is to write articles that are deliberately unfinished so people can add to it.
5 Point Structure
- what are the top five points to make about something?
- this keeps from having a disorganized mess of information on a page.
- the five points can be the elements of a template, i.e. introduction, examples, etc.
- better to make links to related topics, then put something on the destination page instead of leaving it blank (if it's a new page). This directs the growth of information.
