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.
