Michael Wesch continues to challenge educators and parents in his observations of students and educational institutes. One of his videos from 2007, A Vision of Students Today, raises questions about how higher educational institutes are (or are not) adapting to the changes in society and the increasingly connected information age students. Another one of his 2007 videos,  Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, illustrates the changing face of the web, from a static one-way medium to a dynamic two-way, user driven and user created content medium. Wesch made these observations way back in 2007. Since then we have seen some growth in the use of Web 2.0 tools in education.

One particular Web 2.0 tool is the wiki, a medium in which users can edit content in a browser, add additional pages with simple tags, and are generally created collaboratively. Wikipedia is likely the most well known wiki. In education, wikis can be used to create a community of learners who are distributed across space or time, or can be used to highlight student work, or become Scardamalia & Bereiter’s (1994) center for class knowledge construction.

In ETEC 565A we constructed a wiki. It was clear we were novices in wiki construction; we had lots to say, but did not organize it well, and treated it more as a strange discussion forum than a place to collaboratively build knowledge. What was clear to me was that in the classroom direction, leadership, and clear examples would be needed to make the wiki work. What was also clear was the need to present (or clearly make available) instructions on how to use the particular wiki software.

I have used a wiki in my classroom with limited success, probably for the same reasons as noted above: not enough direction and leadership, no clear example for students to follow, and no clearly visible link to an editing tutorial. I will continue to use the wiki as a collaborative learning tool, as I can see the benefits, and encourage others to use them too, as they are one way to address the questions raised by Wesch’s videos.

maurice

Scardamalia, M and Bereiter, C (1994). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3 (3), 265-283