Wikis for education

Posted on 27. Mar, 2010 by Antoinette Vesseur in Assignments, eLearning, FASoS, FHML, FHS, FL, FPN, Inner City, Practices, Randwyck, SBE, Staff, Student Feedback, Students

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences uses Wiki’s as a collaborative learning tool – specifically within the course Media and War, which is a third year course in the Bachelor specialization Media Culture. The course focus is on an analysis of the ways in which acts of war are medialised, rather than on the social-political and economic causes and implications of war. Besides learning the knowledge and skills immediately associated with the medialisation of war, students also learn to:

Work collaborative,:
Work in peer-review groups,
Structure hypertext,
How to write for hypertext,
Present research in the form of a website, and
Acquire several computer skills (such as photo editing)

During week 1-5 students are assigned to groups each focusing on a specific cluster. Per meeting, each group reports on a cluster related theme. The findings are rewritten for Wikipedia and posted on the wiki to be peer-reviewed the next meeting.

During week 6-8 students work on an individual assignment, formulating a small research plan and adding contributions to the wiki. By doing so the students create a meaningful, collective wiki. The individual students also do redactional work on the whole wiki.

Why was a wiki chosen?

It supports organization of the course
Feedback and support platform for students
Facilitates execution of learning activities
Offers advantages in offering and sharing content
Focus on community and collaboration
Easy-to-use and global standard markup language

The Wiki doesn’t run on our own Blackboard environment, other products are being used:

MediaWiki – a freeware program from the Wikimedia Foundation, originally written for Wikipedia
LivingDot – a hosting company specialized in Blogs and Wikis
cPanel – a control panel for managing the databases etc

Results:

Course appreciation = 9 (on a 1-10 scale)
Wiki regarded as a necessary tool for this course (by both students and staff)
Wiki regarded as user-friendly (by both students and staff)
The wiki used is a generally accepted standard within social software
Expending the wiki to other courses would mean a return on investment in money, but not in time

Contact information: