Monday, February 22, 2010
Wiki Connections
As our group was researching the use of wikis, I found it so interesting the many uses - both in and out of the classroom. A couple of the articles I had the opportunity to read looked specifically at collaborative learning and utilizing wikis for group projects. Now, to many people this may just be another use for wikis in teaching and offering students a way to communicate and build documents together for their project. However, the combination of my fascination of group work and currently being up to my eyeballs in research around group work in the classroom as I am doing revisions to my thesis literature review send my mind spinning. Student perception of group work in the classroom vary greatly - would adding technology improve their perception? If a student could effectively manage a group project via technology tools such as a wiki for documents, etc., would employers find that a beneficial skill? Would using/requiring wiki technology for group work increase a student's conscious awareness of their contributions to a group? Would the technology help or hurt a student's focus on learning the process of group work (or would it simply encourage contribution to have their name posted?)? Woudl technology driven group work help or hurt an individual when technology is taken out of the equation; could that individual facilitate the same collaboration in person? Hmm...maybe I have found my dissertation topic...or just another side project?
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I just started a project wiki for a large scale research project involving several different PIs and graduate students. We are currently trying to coordinate technician time and divvy up equipment that we share. Last year, we did this using a white-board in the kitchen of the dorms where we stayed. Using this wiki, it gives grad students, PIs, and technicians the ability to view the information and make plans without lots of emails and phone calls. The point of this tangent is that I think the wikis are very valuable tools for any work done in groups. I think that wikis would be one way to make group work less painful for students because it allows them to check the wiki at their convenience rather than being bombarded by emails from group members and structuring their time for synchronous meetings. In my mind, the wiki would allow students to develop similar projects while removing some of the negatives that I associated with group work.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I have been shamelessly promoting the use of wikis to everyone who does group work in their classes for some time now. If nothing else, they take the pressure off of groups to be constantly meeting face-to-face by allowing for real-time editing. The fact that the instructor can see who has done what is also pretty great when you're trying to keep track of individual contributions. I'm not a big group-work fan, for the most part, but I feel like wikis would make it more tolerable!
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