Becky Custar - Using Wikis

Wikis! Until now, I never knew what I was missing!

I have use a wiki one time in my teaching career but never realized until now what a flexible, powerful, and easy to use tool wikis are. Two years ago, the media specialist at my high school set up a wiki for me to facilitate a student research project. It was basically a pathfinder, and it contained one-stop-shop for students to access links to pertinent websites and databases. It was cute – looked like a notebook. It was – and still is – linked to the media center website and students can still access it. So can you if you want to see one relatively uninspired application of the wiki tool:

Open Your Eyes Research Project

That was my introduction to the wiki – and no one told me that it could do so much more than just host a static Research Guide.

What exactly is a wiki and how do you make one?

A wiki is a website that allows group members to collaborate in various ways. It is easy to use – for teachers and kids…it has two buttons – Edit and Save. Group members can link it to other wiki pages or other websites and insert multimedia (student creations like pictures, video clips, and digital stories). As the administrator of a group, the teacher or librarian can monitor which group members contribute what ideas (and how groups members conduct themselves) and can track how they edit and contribute to a collaborative project.

Creating a Wikispace is free, and you make one by following the directions at Wikispaces.com or pbworks.com.  There is a Wikispaces for Teachers (ad free) and a Wikispaces Classroom, an instructional tool (also free of charge) which I will describe below. In addition to group collaboration, this Wikispaces Classroom adds features that allow for organizing instruction – including the ability to monitor progress and give feedback and help as well as social interaction between students (in a private, safe space).

What can you do with wikis?

You can use a wiki to do anything involving any group of people – whether it be groups of students, the faculty and staff, the student body as a whole, or the larger school community. Teachers can set up collaborative learning projects for students; school librarians can set up information hubs for various school and community groups.

Click on the link to see some examples of how education professionals have set up and used educational wikis. This website is so useful that you’ll probably end up bookmarking it on your computer: Educational Wikis

Wikispaces Classroom is set up specifically for teachers, and it is really awesome. It makes project-based learning easy because it lets the teacher create projects and organize students into groups to work together. It allows students to share their work – not only with each other but with parents as well. It also has a project tracking feature so the teacher can keep tabs on how everyone is doing. This website also offers a way for class members to communicate outside of school – and for the teacher to control who’s in the group and to monitor discussions.

As an educator, why should you care about using wikis for collaborative learning?

Wikis have all of the benefits of collaborative learning, such as cooperation between peers, active learning, and differentiation of learning activities. They extend these benefits by allowing access outside of the typical hour-long class period, and because they keep a record of edits, they let the teacher see how the work progressed and who contributed what ideas. Even better, Wikis take collaborative learning to the next level by making it easy for kids to create and share digital products and to evaluate and give feedback to other group members. In other words, wikis promote student cognitive engagement on the higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy. That’s what we want.

As a media specialist, what can you do with wikis in your school library media program?

Joyce Valenza is a high school teacher-librarian and blogger for the School Library Journal who I have enjoyed reading. (Her blog is called The NeverEnding Search!) She is an enthusiastic fan of wikis and has had a lot to say about them over the years. 

·         In her October 19, 2007 posting “More ‘things’: Next steps along the 2.0 journey, she talked about how we as school librarians need to move past introducing teachers to 2.0 tools and into how we (along with classroom teachers) can apply those tools to engage students in learning, especially in digital literacy things “informational fluency.”

·         Her June 27, 2007 blog posting “You know you are a 21^st century teacher librarian if you …” she describes wikis as a way to “pull together resources to meet the information needs of your learning community.” This includes “collaborative wiki pathfinders to support learning and research in all learning arenas.”

·         Valenza promotes wikis as the perfect pathfinder format for teaching digital literacy. In her blog posting June 20, 2007 “Ten reasons why your next pathfinder should be a wiki,” she points out that because they are so easy to use, wiki pathfinders allow students to be more independent as they work on projects. They can include both links to everything a student researcher needs plus your advice, suggestions and general guidance.

·         But for me, her reasons that include how easy the wiki is to use are the best ones. It is easy to link to any electronic resource you have and to upload documents. You can access it from anywhere, so if you have a brainstorm in the middle of the night you can get up and edit the wiki. Furthermore, you can collaborate with teachers in creating and editing pathfinders. Finally, the pathfinder “might just be another opportunity to showcase the work of the critical efforts of teacher-librarian in the 2.0 educational landscape!”

What is the most awesome and practical wiki information I found?

It’s called Elementary Library Routines and it is a wiki ‘platform’ specifically used by school librarians to organize information about the school library media program. I am certain it could be adapted to use in middle and high schools as well. It is a library webpage with links for procedural things that students need to know (like bathroom procedures, book care, reserving books, checking out books, and using computers), things that teachers need to know (like how AV equipment is managed, how to schedule time in the library, and what special events and programs are available), and instructional support for the curriculum. 

What are potential drawbacks in using wikis?

A wiki is as engaging, dynamic, and useful as its creator makes it. It can be like the uninspired wiki I link to at the top of this post; it can be as amazing as Disney World. Well, let’s make it Epcot. As school librarians, we can make sure the wikis we create fall in the dynamic, amazing category; we can also help teachers learn how to make their instructional wikis engaging for kids. There actually are rubrics for evaluating wikis – which can be used to assess student-created ones or to help teachers evaluate their own. The general criteria include how engaging the content is (images, videos, slide shows); the accuracy and currency of links to valid outside websites; and the appearance, organization, and ease of navigation.

Potential Drawbacks of Wikis:

·         Initially time consuming to set up

·         Easy for editors to drastically change the content – even delete the whole thing intentionally or accidentally

·         Overwhelming to grade

·         Has to be carefully monitored lest it turn into a confusing mess

·         It is a feast for the lazy and unmotivated – because if they have access to everyone else’s work they can be derivative or just coast along on the efforts of others.

·         Web based – if the internet goes out, you don’t have access

·         Plagiarism and copyright issues

·         Kids easily distracted by the proximity of the WWW and their social media

Why is it worth it to figure out how to address potential drawbacks?

1) Wikis are a good fit for the way kids organize their lives nowadays – engagement with technology and ability to persist in learning new technology; online social interaction with their friends and classmates.

2) They are a good fit with the ‘newer models of learning’ in which the teacher becomes a facilitator and guide, and the students engage in more authentic and collaborative learning activities.

So, what do you think?

·         Have you used wikis before? If so, how?

·         If not, are you inspired to check out wikis as an instructional collaboration tool?

·         Do you think they are a good fit with the school library media program? How have you seen them used?

·         What drawbacks have you encountered, or do you anticipate?

·         How would you ‘fix’ the drawbacks?

·         Dr. Cooper’s question: While Wikis are touted as collaborative tools, many seem to be passive "storage cabinets." What elements need to be present to move them toward being active spaces for collaboration?

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