Report of Wikis

  Different from blogs which are indicated to personal critique and reflection on a range of topics, wikis pay more attention to knowledge constructions which are related to teamwork, communication, common responsibility and rigorous working attitude.

  Wikis present knowledge on static pages that could be updated by people who are permitted to edit the inner contents by administrator at any time, and there are discussion forums on dedicated pages for people to discuss the correctness of certain contents when there is a conflict sometimes. Wikis don’t have control penal like blogs, so people can view the pages they have done directly without any renew operations. Wikis could also record editing history attached to each page and support revision function which means people could go back to any back-up versions memorized before so that people won’t worried about malicious tempering anymore.

  Establishing and developing a wiki resembles operating a word document based on the wikis service provider. “People can change fonts, add bullets, hyperlinks, images, videos, widgets, tables, and do many of the things that they can do in a regular Word document or other digital writing environment.” (P.152) So people won’t have difficulties in using wiki service as long as they have used Microsoft Words or other similar text editing software. The most important difference between Word and Wikis is people should be responsible for what they did on wiki; they must provide quotes or provenance of context on the bottom of each page for correctness-examining purpose. And it’s the major reason that wikis could be utilized for educational purpose to promote students’ rigorous study attitude.

  Teachers can set assignments, upload study resources and topics covered in the syllabus, post announcements on an administrative class wiki that also links to individual students’ wikis like blogs to make students’ study more convenient. But wikis are more powerful than blogs in information and data sharing, structure construction, text organization and acknowledgement based on collaborative online teamwork, so teachers can use it in teaching process to promote students in writing skills, integration of diverse perspectives, appropriate online behavior, engagement in the community and critical ability on others’ unjustified work.

  Teachers are like gardener and students are rather like garden plants which require cultivation, nurturing, nourishment and perhaps the occasional word of encouragement. Plants won’t thrive if they were lake of care of gardener, so teachers must choose appropriate wiki service for students first according to their real educational needs and tell students how to do effectively in the process of wiki-style learning.

  For example, teachers should tell students the reason of choosing wiki as a teaching tool, demonstrate how wiki works in knowledge construction, clarify concrete goals for students to achieve, explain who can contribute to a wiki and how, let them feel ok to change others’ content and don’t feel frustrated if their content is edited by other community members, give suggestions when students get into trouble in constructing their wiki, explain the importance of correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation and tell them success criteria in details, access students’ work and encourage them to utilize wiki for more research works. Additionally, teachers should also divide teamwork up by substantive content area to make each student tackle a different area and be responsible for it, in order to make sure that every student can participate effectively in wiki-style learning process.

  Although it’s really hard for teachers to perform perfectly in this process, but it’s worthy to do that because wikis do functions so well on students’ collaborative study.