Wikis for Teaching and Learning

An academic course presents an opportunity for all participants to collaborate for improving their knowledge. This collective improvement of knowledge is typically documented via material provided by the instructor and notes and assignments prepared by students. Over the course of a semester, these materials provide not only the collective knowledge in that course, but also provide a chronological history of how the knowledge base evolved. The focus of this study is wiki collaboration in teaching & learning contexts. A wiki is a medium in which a group of individuals can work together asynchronously on an idea and easily capture the essence in a reusable format. Technically, a wiki is a collection of hyperlinked Web pages that are assembled with wiki software. With wikis, the line between reader and contributor is intentionally blurred. Further, wiki use reflects the view of an instructor as one who facilitates information sharing among learners rather than simply transmitting knowledge from themselves to their students. Our initial motivation to explore the usefulness of wikis for teaching and learning was driven by the fact that wikis provide a medium in which several individuals could asynchronously work together on an idea and easily capture the essence in a reusable format. We found that: (1) Wikis can be can be used for a variety of tasks ranging from signup sheet for students to self organize, to undertaking business analyses, to analyzing policy positions; (2) Instructor support and facilitation is key; and (3) Ease-of-use issues are present but do not preclude success

Wikis

As a widely applied Web2.0 technology, wikis are open, dynamic websites with collaboratively constructed knowledge, information, and resources, which are freely available to any Internet user. This book chapter serves as an overview to wikis, discussing thei benefits and practical educational applications towards K-12, higher education, corporations, government, and non-profits, providing examples and references to further materials

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real

WikiLiteracy

In January 2019 the University of Derby delivered its first module entirely dedicated to and structured around editing and writing articles for Wikipedia. The course focused on using Wikipedia as a means to improve students’ skills in writing for public consumption, in addition to enhancing their digital and collaborative skills. Students contributed to 118 articles across a range of topics, which were viewed over 11.2 million times, providing them with a public platform no university assignment could match, and introduced them to the challenges of interaction and engagement in a global editing community. Students’ confidence in their digital capabilities was assessed at the start and end of the module and showed a clear increase in confidence across all categories

Connecting Wikipedia and the Archive: Building a Public History of HIV/AIDS in New York City.

This is an overview of a project that was started in 2015 that was collaboratively designed by archivists and historians with the La Guardia & Wagner Archives and LaGuardia Community College’s faculty/librarians. It involves students in the production of a needed public history of the outbreak and impact of HIV/AIDS in New York City via writing and researching contributions to Wikipedia

Freeing Knowledge: Approaches to Foster Collaboration Between Academic Libraries and the Wikipedia Community

Wikipedia has become a ubiquitous source for information, as well as a global community of people dedicated to the free exchange of knowledge. While its convenience may seem at first glance to be a threat to the traditional role of libraries, an overlap of purpose fosters unique opportunities for working together to advance free access to high-quality information and empower learning. This article will address these opportunities by providing specific examples of ways in which libraries can collaborate with Wikipedia to achieve the common goal of making information more accessible, while increasing their utility beyond their local community. An overview of resources to facilitate this endeavor will be provided, along with example projects aimed at exposing library content, teaching information literacy skills, and engaging communities

Social media in L2 education: exploring on-line collaborative writing in EFL settings

This paper presents a classroom experience regarding the use of wikis in L2 collaborative writing settings. Framed in the current post-positivist educational climate in higher education, the adoption of wikis as a Technology-Enhanced Language Learning ( TELL) platform complements and enriches the classroom-based interaction of L2 learners. While developing solid L2 writing and self-expression skills, wikis may be said to foster other related core abilities – reading and comprehension, critical thinking, exegetic skills, integration of culture-specific elements in foreign language learning, and use of new technologies, etc. In the process of drafting culture-bound texts, the co-creating students become aware of the weight of cultural elements in their texts in an asynchronous, cross-cultural communication process, and they are able to bridge the cultural divide not only through non-formal, peer-to-peer learning, but also through empowered cross-cultural understanding in a truly emancipating English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting

First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia

Contributing to history has never been as easy as it is today. Anyone with access to the Web is able to play a part on Wikipedia, an open and free encyclopedia. Wikipedia, available in many languages, is one of the most visited websites in the world and arguably one of the primary sources of knowledge on the Web. However, not everyone is contributing to Wikipedia from a diversity point of view; several groups are severely underrepresented. One of those groups is women, who make up approximately 16% of the current contributor community, meaning that most of the content is written by men. In addition, although there are specific guidelines of verifiability, notability, and neutral point of view that must be adhered by Wikipedia content, these guidelines are supervised and enforced by men. In this paper, we propose that gender bias is not about participation and representation only, but also about characterization of women. We approach the analysis of gender bias by defining a methodology for comparing the characterizations of men and women in biographies in three aspects: meta-data, language, and network structure. Our results show that, indeed, there are differences in characterization and structure. Some of these differences are reflected from the off-line world documented by Wikipedia, but other differences can be attributed to gender bias in Wikipedia content. We contextualize these differences in feminist theory and discuss their implications for Wikipedia policy.Comment: 10 pages, ACM style. Author's version of a paper to be presented at ACM Hypertext 201

Wikipedia and MediaWiki: two key elements of a wikipedogagy practice

Produção científica Integrada no âmbito da Rede Académica Internacional WEIWER®, UID4372/FCT Laboratório de Educação a Distância e Elearning, Universidade Aberta.Atas do XXV Simpósio Internacional de Informática Educativa, realizado no Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, de 16-18 de novembro de 2023.In this text we aim to present the planning of the curricular integration of Wikipedia in Higher Education, more specifically in the course “Research in Education”, of the 1st year, 1st semester, of the Master programme in Information Management and School Libraries of the Open University Portugal. The pedagogical exploration of this encyclopedia in this master's degree began in the academic year of 2020/2021. However, the innovation now lies in the fact that we are proposing to replace one of the platforms formerly used (Google Docs) by MediaWiki, and expand the activities in this software. So, in addition to editing the Wikipedia articles in the encyclopedia’s main domain, students will simultaneously work in the Wikipedia test pages and in the Open Textbook, also created in MediaWiki, about the topics related to the 3rd theme of the course, ‘Research in Education: data collection and analysis’. At a pedagogical level, work is designed to be collaborative, bearing in mind active methodologies, like Flipped Learning, in the framework of Open Education, ultimately targeting at the development of the Wikiliteracies, as embodied in a Wikipedagogy practice.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio