Wiki Pedagogy in colour

So hot on the heals of the whole EduPunk rethunking, and to elaborate for our wiki paper, Luke suggested a diagram of what wiki pedagogy was in our course. So I’ve put together a first draft trying to demonstrate how things interconnect in our wiki teaching. There are a number of things that we do slightly differently from other work that I’ve seen.

I think the significant thing that we do differently is start with an empty wiki.  Okay, it’s not completely empty, but we only have the core course information in the wiki at day one.  We are developing a set of tutorials very similar to those found in WikiEducator, but modified for TikiWiki.

This means that students have to start the work. The idea is to get them thinking about how community development is facilitated by technology.  They must not only create the course ‘text book’, but they create the community of students who develop this.  I figure that this is an experience that is important — getting things off the ground without any assumption that things are already going, which I sense is a key thing for established LMS.  Everything is already there for the beginning of semester and all the students have to do is absorb.

But not in this course.  There is very little information about the content of the course.  There is some structure, and we’re getting better at putting this in place to guide students, but there really isn’t much.

Wiki Pedagogy in Colour (Click for larger version)

The diagram shows some of the things that I think are important in the wiki course.  The Pedagogy is based on ideas about community of practice ideas[1], bringing novices from the peripheries to the centre, providing some pathways for developing knowledge and for developing collaborative workstyles. There’s also a theme of ’students as designers’[2].  This is in contrast with developing group work practices, because while they are all working together, they are all working separately, so they are really only responsible for their own output, but can build upon the work of others, comment, critique and interact, but not depend on others.

In the diagram, all the tools in the Wiki Learning environment (well, most of them) are listed.  There are really two kinds of tools, which I’ve labeled knowledge production and collaborative.  The knowledge production are generally where thoughts and learnings come together.  These features generally allow the display of developing knowledge and includes images, pages and blogs.  There is generally space to develop an idea in words and pictures.  This is where we assess the more traditional demonstrations of knowledge.

Collaborative features are those that let students engage with one another.  There are comments (and this should probably include the forums, but these tend not to get used too much), private messages (where students send a message to one or more — kind of like email in the wiki) and the shoutbox which is like a open messaging system where a single message can be sent to all participants.  The students kind of like that because the shoutbox appears on every page, and quite often someone responds to them in the shoutbox.  It’s like a multi-threaded public conversation in short bursts.  Very twitterish, now that I think about it.

Essentially, students commence the course at the periphery and sometimes on the edges of the community.  Most of them are not well established in the field as we are almost presenting a new area (mobile workforce technologies).  We have IT students, marketing students, MBA students,    We see many of them move into the community of practice through active engagement with knowledge formation processes.  The CoP surrounds the wiki tools in the wiki learning environment. There is an embeddednes about the whole structure.  Everything happens in the wiki (with the exception of providing students with their passwords which we do through the gradebook of Blackboard.)

All of these features allow students to actively reflect on the processes of knowledge development and construction and maintain their activities in a single space.  It’s a whole environment wrapped up in free software.  You can’t get much better than that.

1. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [↩]
2. Kimber, K and Wyatt-Smith, C, (2006). Using and creating knowledge with new technologies: a case for students-as-designers, Learning, Media and Technology, 31 (1): 19–34 [↩]

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