Having previously explored synchronous communication tools in Moodle with the creation of a chat room for instructor office hours, for this module’s eLearning toolkit activity I decided to explore asynchronous communication tools. For this activity, I chose to draft a plan for a collaborative wiki.
Wikis provide means for asynchronous sharing and collaboration on documents over time, and one reason why the choice of a wiki fits into my instructional goals for NDIP101 is because as an ongoing pre-placement course, successive groups of students could work on Wiki content as the CAF Campus continues to evolve. As such, this wiki would be a form of “living document.” As NDIP101 is a new course for a new internship program, the first students would create content based around portions of CAF Campus Operational Framework, whereas future students would be able to create content based on this or other projects in development of the CAF Campus.
Furthermore, Educase (2005) notes that wikis may be a powerful tool for “soliciting ongoing input for research or projects where community input can help inform and direct subsequent investigation,” and as my group of students would be following their participation in NDIP101 with a research internship, a wiki component seems like a natural fit, especially if the wiki could be accessed by the training authorities that would be receiving the interns.
While the chat room was very simple to create, the wiki took a little more playing around with – however, with what I see as a powerful capacity for use as a long-term teaching and learning tool, the extra time to orient myself to the functions of the Moodle wiki is well worth the effort. I had a lot of questions in this sandbox activity, and finally realized that much information can be gleaned by clicking the unassuming little question marks that appear throughout the Moodle interface – For example, this is finally the way I found how to create new pages on the wiki, and how I found differences between the three formatting options of HTML, Creole, and Nwiki.
I was unfamiliar with the second two format options, but searching Moodle Docs I found that Nwiki is the markup that is standard to general Moodle activities, and Creole is a more general wiki markup language found across the web. Both options provide an edit-toolbar when applied to the wiki settings.
At first, in keeping with my learning-centered goals and with the nature of my NDIP101 course, I thought I would use the HTML format with it’s WYSIWYG editor, not wanting to take energy away from the spirit of content creation if students are trying to figure out how to use the wiki markup format. However, in further experimentation with the wiki, I realized some flaws of my choice. The power of wiki markup language is that it creates a standardized look within a document written by many people, but using WYSIWYG editor leaves open the opportunity for much more variation. In addition, perhaps knowledge and practice of wiki markup languages would be a benefit to the learner group. I would have to consider the format choice more deeply.
Moodle’s wiki has has features for view, edit, comments, history, map, files, and administration. I believe this would be a powerful tool to use in a long-term living document, as the structure and features help to automatically organize the flow of information as the content grows. There’s also the ability to tag pages, which would add further information management capacity.
In sum, I am happy to have engaged with the activity of drafting an asynchronous communication activity, and to have dabbled in the creation of a wiki on Moodle. I will certainly be experimenting more with the wiki feature as my Moodle site continues to evolve.
References:
Educase (2005). 7 Things You Should Know About…. Wikis. Retrieved February 21, 2014, from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7004.pdf
