Learning Technologies: Design & Applications

RE: collaboration and discussion within the wiki space

Reflecting on my participation:

I initated this wiki activity at the beginning of the week.

1. First, I a added a “sighting”.
2. Then, I thought that it might be useful to add a structure in the “discussion” area of the wiki, to ensure some type of organization to the conversations.
3. As time passed, and few entries were appearing, I thought that perhaps there was a need for clear objectives. So I added an area where 5 challenges and 5 strategies would be selected by the class.
4. After reading some of the comments, I decided to activate this area by adding a suggestion and finding a way to elicit participation.
5. I therefore added a suggestion in the strategies section, my name and asked people who agreed to also write their names. I replicated this model to the challenges section.

General impressions:

• The wiki discussion area is very different from an LMS standard threaded discussion space. 
  • For one, HTML is necessary in order to organize the writing. Without it, comments soon become a big soup of ideas.
  • I found that some of the students followed the bullet structure that was initiated, but some did not.
• Advantages in using wikis for group collaboration? 
  • It’s a change and it certainly triggers interest.
  • It is useful to know how wikipedia works.
  • HTML is also important to review once in while. I found most of my questions on the web (lists; bold; italics; etc.)
• Challenges of working with others in a collaborative wiki space?
  • Too many comments in one place.
  • Hard to distinguish between one author and another.
  • Challenging to keep some kind of order in the discussion.
  • Challenging to “discuss” and come to a decision when too many people are involved.
  • Hence, my quest for an operational structure.