Week 5.2 Exploring Wikis

“Wiki is not a tool.  It’s a way of working.  It’s a way of collective reflection around an object”  (Frustratingly untraceable internet quote, 2013)

Before beginning this week’s readings and engagement activities my understanding of wikis was limited to using Wikipedia for general research and watching an introductory level YouTube video explaining the concept.

After watching Richard Buckland's Lecture "Wikis in University: Teaching and Learning" ,I was excited about exploring wikis and their capability to support quality teaching through collaboration, student ownership, transparency, timely feedback and accountability. While I could also see the benefits for both teachers and students in using wikis to edit, revise and manage multiple drafts of individually written work, the overarching message I took from this lecture was the power of Wikis as a collaborative tool. 

I also wanted to have a specific focus for my exploration of wikis - unlike my exploration of blogs which was not guided by any particular learning objectives or content area. I chose a vocabulary development focus and used a loose adaptation of the process used by Richard (Buckland, 2009) to support his university students to create lecture notes.

I have documented the process of designing my own wiki Valiant Vocabulary Voyagers below.
Generic Username and Passwords for access 
User Name : userSSwiki4    Password:  passwordSSwiki4
User Name : userSSwiki5   Password : passwordSSwiki5

Wiki Design

1.      HOME- welcomes members, explains the purpose of the wiki and includes a list of the vocabulary terms that will be covered in Term 1. I linked these to individual pages for each word. I found it interesting that creating the link would automatically create the page if I hadn’t already done this.

2.      TEMPLATE – As pointed out by Wendy in our notes for this week, wiki’s are a “ soft” technology. I have “hardened” the wiki by creating a template to guide and scaffold student contributions.

·       First section of the page – completed by one or two students.

Purpose: revision of lesson.

 All the information within this section – word, text and sentence in which it is found, definition, examples and non-examples – would be covered in an explicit vocabulary lesson in class. Students would be note taking.

·       Second section of the page – contributed to by all students.

Purpose: consolidation through further interaction/experimentation with the word and collaborative construction of an understanding of the word.

Fact File : All students would be able to research and add information to this section. There are headings students but students could add extra information if needed. Students may use comments and discussion to negotiate correct answer.

Bright Ideas: Students add experiences with the word in life or in their writing. Although this is done individually, there is scope for students to comment on each other’s use of the word and learn from their peers.

·       Comment function - In edit mode I highlighted sections of the template and wrote myself notes about extra instructions or videos I would need to create to support students.

3.      Gradually EXAMPLE page :  I completed an example of a completed page. This gave me an opportunity to refine the template and also provides students with an exemplar to support their contributions. 

4.      Other Vocabulary terms pages : Wikispaces enable creators to duplicate pages but I can copy and paste the template page into each new vocabulary page.

5.      HELP :  Creating the EXAMPLE page helped me identify areas where students would benefit from technical support to complete tasks (see comments in TEMPLATES page) . I created the HELP page to store these tutorial videos and /or written instructions. I imagine that the teacher would create these initially but that students may modify and update this page as needed. I could also add an experts sections to this page to direct students to classmates who can help them with different technical tasks.

There is the possibility to collaborate in the wiki with other classes regardless of physical location. Because many of the words covered in lessons will be linked with C2C content it may be most beneficial to work with another Queensland school.

Technical Challenges

Structure: Because I don’t have a comprehensive picture of how wikis are structured, I created a new wiki rather than create it as a section within my original “EDEL20002 Experimentations” wiki. Even after spending quite a bit of time creating this wiki I don’t have a good understanding of the Navigation bar and tags.

Design: I find the options for changing the look of my wiki very limited. The B7Bobcats wiki is visually appealing but I think this has been done through embedding Glogsters and Voicethreads in the wiki pages. This is something I would like to explore further.

Images :I tried to add some visual appeal to my wiki by using images and WordArt to create headings in Word then taking a screen snip, saving to my computer then uploading the file to the wiki. I found it best to save images as a jpegs rather than a png because the file size was smaller. I also found that I could just copy and paste Microsoft clip art images directly into the wiki rather than saving to my computer and uploading.

Audio-:  I recorded a short sentence using the recording program on my laptop( SoundRecorder)  and saved this to my computer. It will only save as a WMA file. I was able to upload this file to my wiki but was not able to play it. I converted the file to MP3 using FormatFactory and reuploaded. This file played.

Tables: I also found the using tables in wiki very frustrating as this function does not allow creators to set the width of tables – they move with the text.

Video Files: I was able to directly upload video files to my wiki but could not find a format that would play in either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. I recorded a short video of a hand action to match the word using my webcam. This successfully uploaded as a WMV file but would not play. I converted this video file to avi and mp4 files using FormatFactory (http://www.pcfreetime.com/ and uploaded those files but neither would play correctly.  Finally I uploaded the video to YouTube and used the widget tool in Wikispaces to embed the file.

Concurrent Users:  If two users are logged in to the wiki and are making changes at the same time, only one user’s changes will be saved. This would need to be taken into account when timetabling access to the wiki in a classroom situation – i.e. it would not be helpful to book the computer lab for the whole class with the intention of working on the wiki.

Other ideas for using Wikis
Another idea I would like to explore with a class is using wikis for narrative writing. I was inspired by the 1001 Flat World Tales writing project explained in 21^st Century Learning and the potential for Wikis to transform writing. In this project students wrote personal narratives. They collaborated with students from other countries to edit and rewrite their work.

 I was also interested in a choose you own adventure story wiki – with scaffolding ( such as an X chart to support description and detail.

Collaboration between students and the community in creating a local history wiki was another idea I found intriguing.

Wik is affordance analysis v5 from sjshannon47

REFERENCES
Buckland, R. (Director) (2009, February 3). Wikis in University: Teaching and learning. Wikis: Collaborative workspaces workshop. Lecture conducted from UNSW Computer Science and Engineering, Sydney. Retrieved December 31 from  http://youtu.be/m1-8OOrBi0o  

Interesting Links from Readings (and beyond)
A choose you own adventure collaborative narrative - http://terrythetennisball.wikispaces.com/
Links to support and interesting examples http://rellco.wikispaces.com/Wikis+for+Learning
Ideas for using Wikis - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rJNWa4qABGxYoIu7v3MjcqkQrpnO3lXNllkHDxIWbjQ/present#slide=id.i0
A wiki walkthrough including useful ideas for using wikis in the classroom - http://www.teachersfirst.com/content/wiki/
Example of collaborative project across 2 schools - http://flatplanet.wikispaces.com/About
More ideas for using wikis- https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rJNWa4qABGxYoIu7v3MjcqkQrpnO3lXNllkHDxIWbjQ/present#slide=id.i0
The B7Bobcats wiki - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rJNWa4qABGxYoIu7v3MjcqkQrpnO3lXNllkHDxIWbjQ/present#slide=id.i0