Digital Tool 5 - Wikis for Learning

Collaborative Learning - Photo courtesy of flikr

Wikis are so versatile! I would like to post a link back to 50 Ways to use a Wiki for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom, it was posted in Moodle but for any of you who missed it there - here it is for you again!

I have not created my own wiki as yet, I'm saving that pleasure for the next assignment, but I have had a look at some wikis including our class one mackayelearninggroup which has got me to thinking about their use in educational contexts.

Wikis are simply the best web 2.0 tool for supporting online collaborative learning. Collaborative learning is underpinned by Vygotsky’s Constructivist learning theory and the ‘inherent nature of social learning which is shown through his theory of Zone of Proximal Development’ (Wikipedia, 2010), where students each bring their own knowledge, experiences and areas of expertise to a task and effectively scaffold other students to construct their own understandings as they work together to complete a task. Considering Howard Gardener's Multiple Intelligences and how that applies to the learners in your cohort would be a great starting point to allow you to create groups of learners of mixed strengths and abilities for creative collaborative tasks.

By using a wiki, students can contribute directly to their groups set learning tasks from any computer with internet access. Viewing and contributing to the wiki and watching it evolve enables the authors active participation in the learning process and promotes responsibility for their own learning. Wikis allow the recent activity to be monitored so the learning manager would be able to identify who has contributed what and made sure that all group members have contributed equally and are all participating in the learning, something I feel very strongly about in collaborative work situations.

I also love how wikis can connect people who share a passion for the same interests. In a classroom situation the learning manager could set up four or five different wikis each with a slightly different viewpoint on a particular topic and students could choose to contribute to the wiki they best felt suited their interests and strengths. There are just so many ways you could use a wiki with your students.

I am looking forward to participating in my first collaborative wiki task for Managing E-Learning Assessment Task 3.

Wikipedia. (2010). Collaborative learning. Retrieved August 20th, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_learning