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.
11 comments
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March 24, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Sean FitzGerald
Huh? What’s Dave on about? Where did you even say that wikis were courses? It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you would say.
And where did you say wikis are meant to replace practical activities and experiential learning?
Wikis can be used to deliver courses, like blogs (or even LMSes) can, and wikis are being used to deliver courses all the time.
“Wiki’s are just textbooks.”? Wikis can do everything an LMS can do, and then some, including linking to rich multimedia resources, embedding all manner of Web 2.0 goodies like videos and presentations and polls and even chat boxes for synchronous exchange. They can also provide the option for students to contribute. I’d like to see a textbook do all of that!
If a wiki is unstructured – as Dave complains – it’s because the creator hasn’t structured it! There are plenty of structured course wikis out there.
If you need more examples then off the top of my head I’d point to Wendy Zammit’s Communicating Online and hopefuly we will see some more interesting uses of wikis over at Sydney Institute of TAFE’s new wiki initiative, like this DIGMEDIAWORK course, which is exploring ways for students to contribute and participate.
March 25, 2008 at 9:26 am
dave
I know that lots of people use them as the teaching source. Your list could have been longer, I could make a big list of courses that use pulped wood. What I’m trying to see is how wiki’s and textbooks differ except for the fact that wiki’s can be a collaborativly written textbook. Many of my textbooks have multimedia, many have labs.
I do NOT think it goes to far to call the examples you cite as “textbooks”
And Sean – I think Leigh often talks about online courses when he means what I see as an online text & lab book.
Now – there’s nothing wrong with a collaborativly written textbook if it’s any good.
I would prefer much much MUCH more discussion on the USE of the reference material.
I’m focused on whole course development because that’s what I do (not just talk about it). So far I don’t see anything that’s convincing. There’s examples all over the place for every single approach to education. Citing more simply shows that you’re not unique (which is a good thing). But examples of a practice do not do much to convince me that it is Good Practice.
And more and more discussions on how one tool differs from another doesn’t help either.
Wiki’s are just electronic textbooks. Useful in a course – but as an element to focus on they are not novel, and are often misused.
And the thought that wiki’s do everything that an LMS does is laughable … unless you develop an LMS around a wiki. It gets circular – if wiki’s do everything an LMS does, what differentiates it from an LMS. The anser to that is probably something that the wiki doesn’t do … so the wiki can’t do everything an LMS can.
Oh – it’s web2.0 … sorry didn’t notice that, I guess that makes it all right
March 26, 2008 at 1:40 am
alexanderhayes
Wiki’s are textbooks….courses….. crap.
Well f…..me as Gordon Ramsay would say.
Crude ? Unstructured ?
Get some order into the educational kitchen of yours Leigh would ya🙂
March 26, 2008 at 1:28 pm
leighblackall
For anyone that simply must have an LMS, both Wikieducator and Wikiversity have been running Moodle for a while now as a feature of their projects..
March 27, 2008 at 12:58 am
alexanderhayes
Yup….good call for those that really need it. An integrated version would be nice and yes Leigh I totally understand your anxiety with the Moodle interface……lock…step.
It does have a few good points though🙂
March 27, 2008 at 11:25 am
alisonruth
Oh, I think wikis do function as text books, but one of the unique things about wikis is that they can become student constructed text books. This is what I’m trying to do with my Mobile Workforce Technologies wiki (https://www79.secure.griffith.edu.au/03/iswiki/tiki-index.php – i think that’s easily accessible). That wiki looks a bit of a mess, not as structured as most of those on your list, but, I think, in an area like mobile technologies, there needs to be less imposed structure and to look for emerging structure. We haven’t got that right yet, but, gee, do students learn! And for most of the course, they learn from each other.
March 27, 2008 at 2:36 pm
db
but is apparently not allowed to respond
March 27, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Sean FitzGerald
I’ll respond here as I don’t feel like signing up to yet another site, but over on Dave’s blog he comments that he thinks my points are funny.
Yes, my claim that a wiki can do everything an LMS does was a bit zealous… but you can add to Wikispaces for example just about any type of Web 2.0 tool you like, but Dave doesn’t seem to hold Web 2.0 tools in high regard, so I can understand why he would think this was funny. I’m so accustomed to mashup thinking that I don’t really think of something like a wiki as a standalone tool anymore. And it’s true I didn’t even think of things like grade books, but it didn’t even register that people were still using tools like that in teaching!🙂
alisonruth: I agree wikis can be used as text books, as some of the examples in Leigh’s post show, but they are not just textbooks, which is what Dave says. My point is that they can be much, much more.
March 27, 2008 at 6:15 pm
fakeDave
Actually Sean – I’ve been actively using Web2.0 tools for over a decade /. Long before Tim O’rielly coined the horrible term.
It’s not that I don’t hold web 2.0 in high regard (I don’t – they’re just tools). It’s more that I am not a complete fanboy overawed, enamoured and completely blown away with them as the silver bullet which will democratise and save the world.
They are JUST tools. It’s really REALLY important to be critical of their use.
And btw – you don’t need to sign in to post on ITToolBox, it just takes a while for the post to appear, unlike this site which seems to reject any post using my real email address for some oh so strange reason.
March 27, 2008 at 8:45 pm
leighblackall
Hello Dave, sorry that your comments were pegged as spam, I recovered 3 solid attempts by you to get your comments in here – but I have no idea why they were pegged as spam.. the original trackback through to your ITtoolbox blog worked OK, but it seems that when you came back with a tekotago email ID we had problems… I can’t think of a reason why that would be… rest assured I don’t filter any comments to this blog, least of all counter opinions.. its the whole reason I blog – to test my ideas.. even though you seem convinced that I’m just “being a fan boy, preaching silver bullet/s, and lacking in critical thought”…😦
What I would be interested in hearing is how the examples I point to are not courses? or how they are “just text books”? and what other examples like them you are aware of. Maybe you could use the Designing for Flexible Learning Practice example..?
To my mind, a text book is something that aims to be a definitive text on a particular topic that teachers use to refer to, or base an entire course on. They are usually structured in such a way so as to appear like a course, but instead of referring OUT to information, they attempt to represent all the information within them. Most of the examples of wiki courses I point to don’t do that, so I struggle to see how they are text books. I see how at first glance they might appear to do that, but the information in them is more like scaffolding than definitive information. In the Designing for Flexible Learning Practice example, it is simply a topic schedule based around a weekly pace. There is no definitive information contained within it, nor is there in the links out from it.. it is simply made up of stimulation media from essays to videos, with an activity set to either practice learning, test learning, or to present assessable evidence of learning. I’m not necessarily saying that the examples I point to include good learning activity design, but I still fail to see how they are just text books.. they appear to me to be in line with a course for learning with a minimal amount of information so as to set people on their independent way.. this is considerably different to a text book I think..
This is an important discussion to have, as I’m sure we both know that too many teachers fall into the trap of producing ‘text books’ when asked to develop online learning (which does not always have to be courses or text books for that matter). They end up working themselves far too hard, trying to produce a one stop place for information and knowledge. I know I find it hard to avoid at times. But I was sure that I was breaking the mold here and producing courses and schedules rather than text books. (Perhaps our definitions differ?)
Would you spare us 30 minutes to deconstruct the Designing for Flexible Learning Practice example? Try to ignore the content or activity design at this stage, that I agree is wanting. You effort here would be helpful for progressing the discussion I think, as it is now it risks reducing to a slagging match of who did what first and whether so and so is a fan boy or not (silly). If you elaborated on how you come to your conclusions, I think we might get somewhere.
March 28, 2008 at 7:47 am
db
but but but ….
I SAW a reply post under fakedave yesterday evening
ok – I give up
Summary reply: Wiki’s ARE textbooks. Critical consideration of all approaches to education is important – web2.0 (sucky name orielly!) is not a silver bullet!