Example Wiki applications in learning and teaching

Many of the applications described on this page draw on the examples reported by Stewart Mader of Brown University (Mader 2006) and an Article by Bruce Lamb (2004). There are four groups of applications that can be considered:

  1. Wikis that are authored solely by staff.
  2. Wikis that are primarily authored by students.
  3. Wikis that are authored and used by staff and students as equals.
  4. Wikis that are publicly available and have been created by others.

1. Staff authored:

  • Authoring and maintaining a set of course support materials with a team of academics (curriculum, text books, exam papers etc) Use of a wiki allows materials to be refined over time rather than rewritten each time a new member of staff delivers the course. (Lamb 2004, Mader 2006, Gibson 2006).
  • Creating and maintaining course reference lists (Lamb 2004).

2. Student authored:

  • Group assignments - page revision history allows the tutor to monitor contributions and observe development of the assignment and individual contributions. This can be done throughout the writing process so issues can be spotted and feedback given before the submission of the assignment (e.g. a non-participating student can be contacted, a lack references to evidence addressed, an error in direction corrected).
  • Group debates - opposing positions argued and evidence presented.
  • Peer self-help pages - student directed wiki dedicated to students helping other students with the problems they identify themselves.
  • Student feedback to staff - a wiki enables feedback to be controlled and owned by the students as opposed to the hidden and directed feedback gathered via questionnaire (Lamb 2004).
  • Subject glossary - individuals/groups of students assigned responsibility for creating definitions for identified terms to build an extending subject glossary overtime. Wiki functionality means this glossary can be subject to continual peer review.
  • Peer review of assignments during their creation - students assigned to guide other students during the process of creating their individual assignments. Marks can then be assigned for the contributions they make to their peers, recorded within the assignment wiki page revision history.
  • Individual portfolios - the flexible nature of wiki's allows an individual to be very creative in their personal portfolio creation and also allows very flexible portfolio mentoring.

3. Staff and student authored:

  • Marking schemes for assignments - ideal for allowing students to really become involved in defining the marking scheme by which their assignments/dissertations will be assessed.
  • Subject glossaries - staff can identify terms for inclusion and also peer review additions.
  • Frequently asked questions - students/staff can pose questions and appropriate staff (or students) can answer these questions.
  • As a discussion forum using the discussion pages and add comment facility.
  • Building case studies, field reports etc.
  • Writing an agenda for a meeting and then publishing and amending meeting minutes (from Lamb 2004).
  • Stewart Mader (2006) advocates the use of wikis as a more flexible, user friendly and cheaper replacement for entire course management systems (Virtual Learning Environments).

4. Created by others:

  • Existing wikis used as a source of information (e.g. Wikipedia) - the issues associated with this as discussed on the using wikis as a reference page.
  • Study of an existing wiki page, its revision history and discussion pages as a model of how knowledge is constructed.
  • Develop researching and public writing skills through contributing to an existing wiki. Wikipedia actively encourages learning activities based around contributions to its articles (Wikipedia school and university projects).

Further info

  • Stewart Mader explorers various application of wikis in education and presents an argument for the replacement of VLEs with a wiki (Stewart Mader's presentation transcript).
  • An early article by Bruce Lamb (2004) explores the educational interest in wikis and presents a variety of applications (Article by Bruce Lamb).
  • The Globaltext project to create free wiki text books for the third world.

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