Dave Bremer, a colleague at Otago Polytechnic criticises my interest in using MediaWikis for online learning.
My problem with this is that Wiki’s are just textbooks…
It is true that in the past, and the vast majority of wikis today are primarily reference materials or text books. But over the past 2 years, a few individuals and institutions have been exploring the use of wikis to develop and manage courses, hoping to leverage the benefits of collaborative editing and open access.
Some examples:
Harvard, US: Law and the Court of Public Opinion. An early example of an open access course that uses a course blog, email forum, Second Life meeting spaces, and a course wiki.
Utah State, US: Introduction to Open Education. Inspirational in its simplicity, and a proven success through its primary use of a wiki that blogging students use as a course schedule.
Media Lab, Finland: Composing Open Educational Resources. Inspired by Intro to Open Ed, this course has been developed on the Wikiversity platform that follows the same simple course schedule format for blogging students to follow. Note the numbers of people in the edit history and discussion page, demonstrating the benefits of collaborative course development.
Otago Polytechnic, NZ: Designing for Flexible Learning Practice. Also following the simple schedule format for blogging students to follow, but on the Wikieducator platform. This course uses a course blog for announcements and weekly summaries, and will be using web conferencing for lectures. Note the use of the Wikieducator Liquid Threads (a threaded discussion feature on the discussion page for the course). Also note the Print to PDF feature which came in very handy on the course orientation day.
Otago Polytechnic: Horticulture. This project mainly uses the wiki as a storing house for lesson plans and activity sheets for use in class or by distant learners. It follows Otago’s development structure based around competency units with a library of resources page and activity sheets set as sub pages to each unit.
Otago Polytechnic: Travel and Tourism. This project also follows the Otago development structure of unit pages with library and activity subpages. The teachers in the course are using course blogs for each of the subject areas and simply point to activity sheets on the wiki depending on the needs of the classes.
Otago Polytechnic: Massage Therapy (link to Programme Manager’s blog post update). Uses the wiki as a storage bay for resources and activity sheets with course blogs announcing new things to the students. Has an interesting use of RSS to a start page to bring together all the different courses to create a course hub.
Otago Polytechnic: Anatomy and Physiology of Animals. A text book developed in Wikibooks, with lesson plans and activities developed in Wikieducator for use in different contexts including face to face classes, or courses within the learning management system. The text book has been picked up by eLearning designers in Vancouver and will be developed further on the open licenses, integrating the activity sheets as well.
In all these examples, I think it would be a stretch to call them simply text books (apart from Anatomy of Animals which is quite deliberately a text with activity sheets to support it). It is difficult to avoid creating texts while creating courses however - as evidenced in just about any LMS course development. This is why some of the wiki courses listed here are using the Otago development structure. The structure encourages the separation of information and other reference materials from lesson plans and activity sheets firstly to maximise re-usability, and secondly to assist teachers who are developing there courses on the wikis to think more deliberately about what it is they want their students to be doing, and to create a variety of different activities around a single learning objective for use in different contexts.
More info about Otago’s exploration of wikis for developing and managing courses on Wikieducator.
6 comments:
Interesting.
What is even more curious is that Leigh is an author of this Blog. Is this a joint Phil & Leigh thing or should we expect other authors?
@BS - go back to the main page, look on your right for a block labeled "contributors"
What I think is "interesting" is how quick anonymous comments have started, or at least comments from a vauge profile. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's the type of thing I often recommend. If you didn't intend yourself to be anonymous you might like to add something in your profile which is a little identifying (but think carefully about what). I suspect that an anon profile is more anonymous than polyears ever was - it's handeled externally.
Your choice of photo in your profile is a blast from the past. I remember enjoying that album but for the life of me I can't remember how the music went ... I might have to hunt it down.
I didn't know that Leigh had copied his response here until this morning. I *thought* I was just engaging in a little too & fro with him and his friends. My blog entry was a rambling stream of consciousness which started out with wanting to say "wiki's aren't courses, they're just textbooks" and moved to me thinking about what tools I'd want in a course, and thinking about education in general. It was never intended as a presentation to the wider OP. I would have appreciated being told that the discussion was being added here (not 'asked' - my comments were public and fair game). Instead I find this entry after hearing about this blog in Phil's update.
But anyway, grumble aside, - in response to Leigh's entry above ...
Yes yes yes - there are lots of examples of the use of Wiki's. Your list could have been bigger, and I could match it with lots of places that do NOT use wiki's. What I'm not convinced is whether the examples in your list are good practice. The fact lots of people do something doesn't convince me either way, not on it's own. A convincing argument and reason, ideally with data, is necessary.
I hope our use of Wiki's and other online stuff IS good practice education. But there's not been much discussion about what that is (good practice I mean). Using Web2.0 branded tools, putting something on blackboard or making something free online for others, is NOT justification that something is good practice. It might be, but the use of web2.0, or paper-based textbooks, or ... anything, could be good, bad or indifferent practice.
But anyway, my point is that the wiki's are used as textbooks, and really that's ALL they are. Bolt other things on the side (like blogs) if you want - but the Wiki component is still just a textbook.
I think it is a stretch to claim that the examples you give are NOT using the wiki as just a textbook & posibly lab book. Sure there may be collaborative authorship (like that's a good idea - some of my worst books have a huge number of authors). But they are basically textbooks.
Depending on the quality of the content, it may even be a good textbook - but that's all it is.
And textbooks, of any kind, can be heavily abused.
One of the abuses of a textbook is telling the class to go to page -insert url or page number- and begin reading, then write a report or discuss amongst yourselves.
That's a really bad practice - I hope that's not promoted in any of the examples, especially the local ones.
Claiming a Wiki is a really good textbook is fine, claiming it is a dynamic and collaborative textbook is honest enough, but making it the focal point of the course is a Bad Thing and claiming that a Wiki is a complete silver bullet which does non-Wiki things is just amusing.
Sorry Dave, now I know your expectations.. I was in a flurry of cut n paste, and did this one mainly in an effort to draw in wider participation than "me and my fiends", as well as to point to the examples of work going on in Poly.
BS, yes, this is a joint blog for all of OP staff - which is something I haven't seen tried before.. I mean all of staff! That is going to make for a massive contributers list on the right that Dave points to. I guess this is like an external Polyears or something...
ok - someone's pulled me up about the anonymity on polyears comment.
First - I am 99.999% confident that polyears is private, confidential and truly anonymous. I am convinced that Phil wouldn't ask for any covert snooping, and I am even more convinced that the person who coded it would scream from the rooftops if anything like that was done.
I am absolutely convinced that an anonymous coward can post on polyears without any fear of being identified. Well 99.999% - I don't have access to the live code.
What I meant was that it is technically possible to change the code which runs that site. Staff can change (CEO and and coders), attitudes can change, weird things happen. The site is handled internally. BTW that would only affect NEW comments - there is no identifying data stored at present.
However - Google has managed to resist handing info over to governments when it was demanded. If you use a anonymous email address like hotmail, yahoo or gmail and then log in to blogger with it, then I think it is absolutely impossible to identify the poster's real name. Not just unlikely based on faith in the ethics of CEO's and coders - but actually downright impossible. Especially if you're posting from a place (like home) where even the bits going from your PC can't be monitored.
So - if you're completely paranoid, your safe. Unless your ISP is really out to get you ... or your tin foil hat leaks - but the dirty secret of security is that at some point you have to trust someone. There is no trust-based security. Where you place that point, who you choose to trust, is up to you.
ummm - I meant
"there is no trust-less based security"
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