Wikis as a Cloud-Based Tool – APA – 3 Pages – 3 References – Due 17 Oct
Requirements:
1) APA 6th Ed format
2 ) Due 17 October
3) 3 Pages (not including title page and references)
4) 3 References
5) Plagiarism-Free
Required Background Reading:
Bentley Wiki: Included in the upload section
Columbia Wiki: https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/our_services/tools/columbia_wikispaces/wikispaces_examples.html
Ted Talk:
Background:
Some schools have made wikis a central point in their educational model. For example, Bentley University near Boston, a school specializing in business education and high-technology, claims to
teach many of their courses “through the lens of Web 2.0
” An excellent example of how Columbia University uses wikis is available at
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/our_services/tools/columbia_wikispaces/wikispaces_examples.html
. Please select any course on the site and explore it further. As you review their video, try to think about what the students there might be getting out of their classes that isn’t currently available to our students; also consider any possible downsides to the wiki-based model that should be evaluated as well.
In this Ted Talk Sugata Mitra discusses how to use the cloud to build a collaborative school in a self organized learning environment.
Assignment:
When you have reviewed the Bentley U. and Columbia University materials and the Ted Talk, please summarize your assessment of the applicability of wikis as a cloud-based tool and the use of the Cloud for self organized learning environments for our educational system in a short (2- to 3-page) paper. Please try to address the following issues somewhere in your presentation:
- Your understanding of how a wiki works and the kinds of things that can be used for
- Your assessment of the wiki model as a representation of the cloud computing approach
- Your specific comments regarding the video from Columbia University and how they use their wiki
- A summary of the thoughts you have regarding the applicability of the cloud computing model to the work of Trident and our students
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Wikis as a Tool for Collaborative Course Management
Mark Frydenberg
Senior Lecturer and Software Specialist
Computer Information Systems Department
Bentley College
Waltham, MA, USA
mfrydenberg@bentley.edu
Abstract
There are growing expectations among college students to be able to access and
manage their course materials over the World Wide Web. In its early days, faculty would
create web pages by hand for posting this information. As Internet technologies and
access have matured over the past decade, course and learning management systems
such as Blackboard and Web CT have become the norm for distributing such materials.
In today’s Web 2.0 world, wikis have emerged as a tool that may complement or replace
the use of traditional course management systems as a tool for disseminating course
information. Because of a wiki’s collaborative nature, its use also allows students to
participate in the process of course management, information sharing, and content
creation. Using examples from an information technology classroom, this paper describes
several ways to structure and use a wiki as a course management tool, and shares
results of a student survey on the effectiveness of such an approach on student learning.
Keywords: Wiki, Course Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Content Creation,
Student Learning.
Introduction
Traditional course management systems such as Blackboard, Moodle, or WebCT provide integrated
solutions for faculty to post course content, assignments, and student grades. They are often document
centered, allowing instructors to post PowerPoint slides, Word and PDF files, and other course content
for students to access. In addition, many course management systems allow students to log in to check
grades, submit assignments, or take exams electronically. The responsibility lies with the instructor to
create the course content for students to download or access.
This paper describes best practices for using a collaborative web application known as a wiki to augment
a traditional course management system. A wiki allows users to create, post, edit, or delete web pages,
thus promoting collaboration among its users. As such, a wiki is a useful tool for involving students in the
process of creating and sharing course content. While course management systems have specialized
features such as online grade books and exams, useful exclusively in academic environments, students
are unlikely to encounter such applications outside of a college classroom. By introducing a wiki for
collaborative course management, students also learn to interact with a real world tool, enabling them to
accomplish some tasks that would be more cumbersome if not impossible using a traditional course
management system.
Because students and faculty can both post information to the wiki, the role of the instructor changes
from being the single authority to being a partner with the students in their own learning. As David
Weinberger writes in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, “When anyone can publish at the press of a
button, the social role of gatekeepers changes.” (Weinberger, 2007, p. 102) Knowledge no longer
exclusively comes from a single instructor; rather, a wiki enables all students to contribute to each
other’s learning. “Wiki use reflects the view of an instructor as one who facilitates information sharing
among learners rather than simply transmitting knowledge from themselves to their students.” (Mindel &
Verma, 2006)
mailto:mfrydenberg@bentley.edu
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Enter the Wiki
The concept of a wiki “is at once both so simple and so novel that it is difficult to grasp.” (Cunningham &
Leuf, 2001) The term wiki was coined by Ward Cunningham on a visit to Hawaii, where he took the “Wiki
Wiki” or “quick” shuttle between terminals at the airport (Cunningham & Leuf, 2001). The term now
describes a “freely expandable collection of interlinked Web pages, a hypertext system for storing and
modifying information – a database, where each page is easily edited by any user with a formscapable
Web browser client. “ (Cunningham & Leuf, 2001, p. 14)
Wiki software tracks revisions so that one may revert back in case of error or malice. This versioning
capability is also useful to monitor the development of a particular page of web content. In most cases, if
two users try to edit the same page at the same time, one will be locked out until the other has
completed making updates. Changes to a wiki are published instantly.
Both wikis and blogs (short for “web logs”) are collaborative web applications for posting information on
the World Wide Web, and have varied use in higher education. (Davi, Frydenberg, & Gulati, 2007). While
a blog allows its users to comment on each other’s posts, participants cannot change anything that they,
themselves, did not post. Blogs are online journals organized chronologically with new posts at the top,
while wikis have a much more open structure, which allows participants to add new pages, or change the
content of existing pages. (Lamb, 2004) Thus the wiki is “forever evolving.” (Wang & Turner, 2004)
One creates a wiki by installing the application to a web server, or more commonly, by registering with
the wiki provider and hosting it at their server. In either case, the site is both updated and accessed
through a web browser, so no software needs to be installed on the client. There are several free wiki
providers. The web site Wikimatrix.org compares features of several wikis. By answering simple
questions such as “do you need page history”, “do you require a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you
get) editor”, and “will your wiki be hosted on our site or yours,” WikiMatrix is often able to recommend an
appropriate wiki provider for a user’s intended purpose.
A user may easily create or modify wiki pages without any detailed technical knowledge of HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language). Most wikis now include a WYSIWYG editor enabling simple text entry.
Some earlier wikis required their users to master a special wiki markup language for formatting text to
appear in a wiki. Because more than one person may edit a wiki page, wikis provide a space where
“knowledge becomes networked … but remains ephemeral: it changes, and can be changed and
mediated by the community.” (Duffy & Axel, 2006, p. 6)
Educational Use of Wikis
Hemphill and Yew (2007) are optimistic regarding widespread acceptance of wikis in educational circles,
citing their advantages over other collaborative tools such as email (which is disruptive) and threaded
discussion boards (which are not always conducive to finding accurate information). Because they
“capture version changes, allow for distributed administration, and persist – wikis …[are] a means to
organize and share knowledge …. It is likely that given the knowledge distributed among members of an
academic community, … such a technology could prove useful.” (Hemphill & Yew, 2007, p. 274) These
features make wikis a “costeffective and readily adopted knowledge management tool” (Lamb, 2004,
p40) for educators, businesses, and organizations who wish to capture communal knowledge.
Wikis have made their way into the classroom as tools for teams to perform group authoring and
collaborative analysis, develop literature reviews for research projects; participate on signup sheets;
summarize readings, post project summaries, communicate with students and create knowledge bases
(Mindel & Verma, 2006; Guth, 2007).
Wikis are useful for students to share their class notes (O’Neill, 2005; Guth, 2007). O’Neill proposes that
“the instructor places skeletal lecture notes onto a wiki site, and students flesh them out with materials
they have learned in class…” Students create a study aid for their classmates, and the instructor sees
what students took away from the lecture. A wiki’s public nature inspires students to “gain a greater
sense of collective ownership” (Guth, 2007, p. 63) over the shared content and process to which they
contributed.
http://www.wikimatrix.org/
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A project management course in a computer science curriculum makes use of wikis to capture group
activities and store them in a centrally available location (Xu, 2007). In an information technology course,
the wiki paradigm “promotes an active learning environment in an educational setting, because students
and instructors become cocreators of course content.” (Elrufaie & Turner, 2005, p.770) To teach proper
XHTML syntax, and as an alternative to requiring students to learn specialized wiki markup language,
Elrufae and Turner (2005) developed a wiki application requiring students to use valid XHTML for input;
invalid code would not be accepted.
Students at Brown University have created a wiki for their classmates to review courses they have taken.
The unstructured wiki provides a forum for stating opinions on a particular course, providing “richer
reviews that combine multiple impressions and perspectives.” (Duffy & Axel, 2006)
Wikis have found their way into industry as well, as organizations use them to capture aspects of
corporate knowledge. Introducing wikis in the classroom prepares students for the “real world” where
wikis are used for collaboration between project groups, collective content management, and creating an
online encyclopedic knowledge base.
Educational Concerns
Lamb (2004) predicted that it is “a safe bet that wikilike writing spaces will be featured in future course
management systems along with other social software tools and protocols such as weblogs and RSS
but if practices don’t evolve, the effects on student learning will be superficial at best.” (Lamb, 2004, p.
46)
In 2007, released versions of Moodle and Blackboard both included builtin wikis as plugins from third
party providers. ( (Moodle: Modules and Plug ins) Blackboard 7 introduced wiki functionality (Blackboard
Building Blocks) and allowed for integrating wiki pages within a Blackboard site, or by incorporating a link
to a Blackboard wiki from the course menu. However, since Blackboard’s wiki is plugin, its wiki pages
cannot currently link to existing Blackboard pages elsewhere on the site, outside the wiki. It is easy to
track which students contribute to the wiki, because access can be set to only allow registered students
to modify it.
Some wikis lack features that are necessary for their acceptance within the educational community.
Lamb (2004) and Hemphill and Yew (2007) argue that a WYSIWYG editor is required, because learning
a wiki markup language is a “powerful deterrent to nontechnical users.” (Hemphill & Yew, 2007, p. 276)
Wang and Turner (2004) proposed extensions for wikis to make them more suitable for classroom use.
These included page locking to handle concurrent edits, and access control to protect certain public
pages (such as the syllabus) or provide private spaces for collaboration.
Security is also an issue among educators. Lamb (2004) suggests that the openness in a wiki is
problematic because anyone can change anything. On the other hand, this also promotes a sense of
trust and community among its users.
Wikis for Course Management
Maloney (2007) suggests that today’s course management systems are not being used to their fullest
potential. Because they are “built around the … course, not the … student,” their most common uses are
for faculty to distribute handouts and students to check grades. “The role that the systems play most
often is like that of an advanced photocopier, allowing faculty members to deliver materials to their
students with greater ease than was previously possible. That use can be important, but it is only part of
what the systems could do.” (Maloney, 2007, p. B26)
While the traditional course management system (CMS) is best used for these common tasks, a next
generation CMS must be centered around the student’s learning, not the course’s administration. This
paper suggests that a wiki may supplement the traditional CMS and give students a forum for
collaborating and sharing their knowledge and understanding for the benefit of their classmates.
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Figure 1. Wiki Login Screen.
Figure 2. The Class Wiki Main Page.
Lamb (2004) cautions that using a wiki as
a CMS has its own concerns. Tracking
user contributions may be difficult, and if
the instructor provides too much structure,
that could limit the wiki’s effectiveness. “An
instructor could structure and regulate
interaction to such an extent that the wiki is
effectively transformed into a stripped
down course management system. But
doing so risks diluting the special qualities
that make wikis worth using in the first
place.” (Lamb, 2004, p. 45)
Course Background
IT 101 (Introduction to Technology) is a
course required of all first year students at
Bentley, a national leader in business
education. The course introduces students
to basic technology concepts, ensuring
they gain basic competency in using and
maintaining their computers, and fluency in
using the Internet. The course builds
individual skills in creating web pages,
developing spreadsheets, and navigating
the Windows XP operating system, all
crucial skills for future business leaders. Creating a course in which the use of a wiki was a key
component encouraged students to embrace the technology because they were required to interact with
it on an almost daily basis.
Accessing the Class Wiki
This class uses PBwiki (PBWiki.com, 2008) and as
its wiki provider. The product is very user and
educatorfriendly. The company provides several
suggestions for using a wiki in the classroom on
their web site. PBwiki supports solutions for many of
the concerns listed in the previous section, as it
includes a WYSIWYG editor, supports page locking,
and has announced that an upcoming release will
provide improved page access features and folders
for organizing wiki pages.
In the wiki used in this class, all students share a
common wiki password, and provide their name and
emailaddress when logging in. (See Figure 1.) The
wiki records any changes as originating from the
name provided and contributors may elect to receive
email notification of any changes. Knowing that they
would be graded on their participation on the class
wiki was a sufficient incentive for students to log in
using their real names.
Upon logging in, the user sees the wiki’s front page.
This “home page” acts as a class portal containing
links to other wiki pages and external web sites. An
announcements panel appears at the top of the
page; the Students panel on the left contains links to
student rosters, class blogs and podcasts, as well as
http://www.pbwiki.com/
http://educators.pbwiki.com/Best%20practices%20and%20examples
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Figure 3. The Schedule Page.
the schedule for students to contribute their class notes to the wiki.
The Course panel contains course materials, including links to a syllabus page, signup sheets, videos,
and collaborative exam study sheets. The Cool Stuff link (described “If you find it, share it”) is a place
where students can share interesting web pages, tips, or other resources with their classmates. The
Coming Up panel on the right contains information about upcoming classes or other class news. (See
Figure 2.)
One of the first exercises that students complete in order to learn how to use the wiki requires them to
create a class roster listing their names alphabetically. Undoubtedly someone posts his or her name in
the incorrect place, and other students quickly realize that they can change what their classmates wrote
by moving the name to its proper position. Other students will discover that they are locked out of the
wiki if they try to edit it at the same time when someone else is already doing so. They must wait until
the change is completed, or the page lock expires due to inactivity.
Students quickly find that they can add pages or content to the wiki. Teachers no longer control the
entire learning experience. No longer are they “organizers and facilitators of learning activity, distributors
of learning material [and] assignments.” (Lund & Smordal, 2006, p. 40)
This class used a wiki for syllabus management, project management, collaborative writing and studying.
The next sections describe techniques employed for doing so.
Syllabus Management
The syllabus is essential to every college course. It
lists course policies, assignments, and schedules.
Of all documents posted to a course management
system, the syllabus is the one that is most likely to
be modified or updated as the semester
progresses.
Often distributed as a Word document, or posted
online as a document or PDF file, once posted, it is
tedious to update. Only the most diligent
instructors will take the time to update the Word
document, convert it to PDF, and post the updated
PDF back to a web site or CMS every time they
deviate from the original schedule. For practically
everyone else, the schedule in the PDF file posted
on Blackboard prior to the first class is “off” shortly
after the semester begins. By creating it as a wiki
page, the syllabus becomes a living document that
is easy to update in the likely event that the
schedule changes. In this way, the syllabus more
accurately reflects the class pace.
The schedule page displays hyperlinks to other wiki
pages containing studentcontributed notes or
instructorprovided course materials. (See Figure
3). Lucas and Frydenberg (2000) developed a
webbased application for course management
using Active Server Pages, where each page had
this structure. Today the use of a wiki is a much
more general solution, and renders this specialized
application obsolete (Lucas & Frydenberg, 2000).
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Figure 4. Collaborative Workspace on the Class Wiki.
Figure 5. Class Notes Page of Wiki.
Project Management
Wikis “establish virtual learning spaces
or environments that facilitate
collaboration across time, interruptions,
and distance.” (Mindel & Verma, 2006,
p. 11) The power of the wiki as a
project management tool comes when
students add information to it.
In one project, each group set up its
own wiki page to chronicle work and
share materials with other group
members. A template provides the
structure for students to enter their
names and tasks completed. By using
the wiki as a collaborative workspace to
note each time a group member works
on the project, each group creates a log
of contributions and a centrally located
collection of resources for team
members. (See Figure 4.)
Collaborative Writing/Note Taking
To promote collaboration, two or three
students are assigned specific dates throughout the semester to post their notes from class to the wiki.
To ensure that they were posted in a timely fashion, students had to complete their wiki notes prior to the
start of the following class. Classmates then reviewed these “Wikipediastyle” notes pages, and added
information that they learned but the original authors may have omitted. The instructor provided a
template containing the class date, space for the contributors to enter their names, and a blank page
below for the notes. “Putting a lecture skeleton onto a wiki website and encouraging students to flesh out
that skeleton can create highquality lecture notes and provide an instructor with valuable feedback on
what students have understood.” (O’Neill, 2005, p. 268)
The instructor taught both a morning
and afternoon section of the class on
the same days. Often one student from
the morning section and one student
from the afternoon section would be
assigned to contribute to the wiki notes
for the day. The intention for doing so
was so that students could experience
their work being edited or changed,
possibly by other students who they did
not know, to mimic the anonymity of
posting to Wikipedia.
A few weeks in to the semester,
however, the students from the
morning section realized that they
could take notes directly in the wiki
during class, rather than copying or
retyping their notes later. As a result,
the task of the student in the afternoon
section often shifted from content
creation to content verification and
embellishment. That student had to
review the notes which the morning
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student had already posted, and perhaps correct or enhance them, by posting a graphic, hyperlinks, or
other related information. (See Figure 5).
To alleviate the problem of always having the notes posted by the morning class students before the
afternoon class student has a chance to write anything, during the next semester, the instructor will
assign only morning class students or afternoon class students to submit notes on a given day.
On occasion, if something important is missing from the notes, the instructor would either add it, or more
likely, discuss it in the next class, and suggest that a student make the appropriate updates.
Collaborative Study Sheets
“When contributing to a wiki project, students are not just writing for the teacher, as is the case in
traditional classroom environments, but for and with their peers.” (Guth, 2007. p. 62) Students used the
class wiki to create a collaborative study sheet from which the instructor would select potential questions
for an examination. A template wiki page contained descriptions of possible question topics, with
question placeholders instructing students to “Type your question here” or “type your answer here.”
Students also posted their names following each question. Each student had to post one original exam
question (and answer) in one of the open placeholders. Students quickly experience the benefits of
collaboration, as each contributes one question, and has the benefit of everyone else’s questions.
Students who posted earlier had their choice of open topics on which to post their questions; students
who posted later had to read through all of the questions that their classmates had already posted in
order to be sure not to repeat one of them. At the same time, students who posted earlier had to return
to the wiki as their classmates added to it, in order to gain the benefit of their contributions. The
upcoming exam would draw from questions based on those that the class had developed. In this way,
students not only helped to make up the exam, but they potentially had a copy of it even before it was
administered.
Students were also told to review each others’ answers and enhance or correct them if necessary. As
the exercise continued, the instructor would also monitor the wiki, posting notes or comments if a
question was inappropriate, or an answer was incorrect. If an important question had not yet been
asked, the instructor, on occasion, would post a question on it, along with the words “Needs an Answer”
for one of the remaining students to provide.
When grading an exam, the instructor noticed that several students gave the same incorrect answer to
one of the questions. A quick check of the wiki indicated that the answer to the question on the wiki was
incorrect. Students clearly used the wiki page for a study tool, but nobody happened to catch – or
correct – that particular inaccurate answer.
What an unexpected teachable moment! It happened at about the same time as Wikipedia discovered
that one of its most popular contributors, who claimed to have advanced degrees in theology, was really
24year old college drop out (Williams, 2007). The instructor asked “if you can’t trust people who you
know in your own class to get it right, how you can trust Wikipedia?”
A long discussion ensued that day about the validity of information that is available on Wikipedia and
other web sites, and who is ultimately responsible for their accuracy. Students offered their ideas about
how to better handle this situation so that it doesn’t occur again. One student suggested that “next time,
each of us should post one question and answer, and indicate that we verified (or contributed to) another
student’s answer.” Most students thought this simple system of checksandbalances creating a “self
correcting community” (Guth, 2007) would be a sufficient improvement over the original ad hoc process,
and help promote the accuracy of the resulting collaborative study sheet.
Impact of Wikis on Student Learning
The instructor used a wiki to augment the traditional course management system in an introductory
information technology course for three consecutive semesters beginning in Fall 2006. During each
semester, students used the wiki as a collaborative workspace for posting shared materials, signing up
for projects, and collaborating with classmates. During the Fall 2007 semester, teams of two or three
students collaborated to post notes from a designated class session to the wiki.
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The first goal of this study was to ascertain students’ prior experience and knowledge of wikis. The
second was to gain an understanding of their opinions on the usefulness of wikis as a tool for learning
and collaboration, and as a tool to support college classroom management.
The instructor administered the same voluntary, online survey regarding students’ experiences using the
class wiki at the end of each semester of the study. Because the wikis were used in much the same way
throughout the study, responses were combined for each semester, and the aggregate results are
presented in the figures that follow. A total of 145 students completed the survey during the three
semesters of this study.
Quantitative Results
It was expected that most students had heard of, but not used a wiki regularly prior to taking this class,
and assumed that after using one, they would come to understand the benefits of a wiki for collaborative
study and learning. The results shown in Figures 6 and 7 are in line with these assumptions.
Over 13% had never heard of a wiki prior to this class; 37% had heard about wikis but never posted to or
edited one; 39% said that they knew about wikis because of Wikipedia. Only 9% of the students said
they had posted to a wiki prior to this class. Each student posted or modified content to the wiki an
average of 7 times during the semester that they were enrolled in the course.
Table 1 displays the questions related to attitudes when using a wiki. Each of these responses was
indicated on a 7point Likert scale, where 1 corresponds to Strongly Agree (SA), and 7 corresponds to
Strongly Disagree (SD). The number of students who provided no answer (NA) to each question is also
indicated in the charts summarizing the results in Figure 7.
The study elicited responses in three areas: impact of wikis as study and learning tools (Q1, Q2, Q7);
collaborative benefits of wikis (Q3, Q4); their ease of use (Q5, Q6), and their benefits as course
management tools (Q8, Q9, Q10).
Figure 7 shows that the majority of the students surveyed felt that using the wiki contributed to their
learning (Q1 and Q2). Their interaction with the wiki gave them a sense of its benefits as a tool for
collaborative learning (Q3 and Q4), and they found it easy to post information to the wiki (Q 5 and Q6).
Students in the Fall 2007 semester found the class notes created by their peers to be a useful study aid
(Q7).
Figure 6. Wiki Familiarity Prior to This Class.
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Table 1. Wiki usage.
The majority of the students wished that other courses would also use a wiki as part of their online
management (Q8), although students were mixed in their abilities to manage multiple course
management tools (Q9). One student commented, “Having the wiki and Blackboard at the same time
was sometimes confusing because whenever I go to check what assignments are due and what need to
be done, I always have to go to both websites.”
The course used Blackboard for administrative course tasks – uploading and submitting homework,
posting assignments, course materials, and grades. The class blog served as the place for students to
post video podcast episodes that they created, or comment on those of their classmates. Students used
the wiki as their place to contribute to the course – by signing up for projects, posting collaborative
questions and notes, or other items of interest for the class. It is important to note that students did not
have difficulty using the any of the different webbased course management tools, but with so many of
them, some needed reminders as to which ones they were expected to use at different times.
The responses to Q10 (“I don’t really need to know about HTML since I can use a blog or a wiki to put
information on the Web.”) were also varied. Students learned to create simple web pages using HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language) early in the course. Many found value in doing so because knowing HTML
gave them complete control over the design of their web pages and the content they were posting to
them. However, with many collaborative, webbased applications (blogs, wikis, and Facebook, for
example) available for posting one’s information to the Web, the reasons for teaching HTML today are
different than they were even five years ago. Then, it was critical to know HTML as creating a web page
was the only way to have a presence on the Web. Several students realized that a knowledge of HTML
was helpful (but not critical) for their ability to post information on the class wiki or blog because it
allowed them to display content other than text. They would often switch to HTML view of a page or use
an HTML container plugin on PBWiki to enter the code for image tags, or embed the HTML code to post
YouTube videos or Google gadgets to the class wiki, or their own blogs.
The survey also asked students for their suggestions of additional ways that the class might incorporate
the use of wikis. Among their suggestions:
• To hold course documents instead of Blackboard
• To post evaluations to other students’ projects
• To share helpful tips from class or hints on homework
• To provide information on nonacademic topics (such as restaurant reviews, locations of useful
campus resources, etc.)
Q1 The class Wiki helped me work more efficiently.
Q2 The use of a wiki in this class helped in my learning.
Q3 Having students collectively create an exam study guide is a good use for a wiki.
Q4 I could see the value of collaboration when using a wiki.
Q5 Posting information to the class wiki was easy for me to do.
Q6 It was hard to learn how to post information to the class wiki.
Q7
The class notes posted on the wiki were helpful for me as I studied or reviewed what
happened in class each day.
Q8 I wish that more college courses would use wikis as part of their online course management.
Q9
With a class wiki, blog, and Blackboard site, it was hard for me to keep track of what course
information was posted where.
Q10 I wish that more college courses would use wikis as part of their online course management.
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Qualitative Results
Students reflected on their experience during the semester by blogging on the question “What did you
learn this semester that I can’t test you on?” Several students commented on the ease of
communication that webbased tools provide, and on how their use impacted not only their learning, but
also that of the entire class. One student remarked:
Coming into IT I really had no idea what to expect. But when we started using [the class] wiki…
I was very intrigued by just how much could be accomplished… …I found the task of using a wiki
… [to be] very useful for my expressing my ideas on the internet, especially with so many people
using Wikipedia these days.
Figure 7. Survey Results. (SA = Strongly Agree; SD = Strongly Disagree; NA = No Answer.)
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Said another student:
Using blogs, wikis, and podcasts was a valuable way for me to not only learn and participate, but
also see how [technology] can be used effectively. It felt like our IT101x class was on the cutting
Figure 7. (continued)
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edge of technology and learning. Using the class wiki communicated the importance and power
of communication over the Internet.
I learned that I have the power to change the Internet with the tools that I am given.
One student had a better understanding of how the World Wide Web evolved into a platform that
enables the use of wikis and other collaborative tools:
Before this class the only wiki that I have ever used was Wikipedia, but still I was not very
familiar with this technology. This form of technology allows various people to update the wiki,
which makes communicating amongst many people much easier, especially using the notes
page in our class wiki.
Students knew that they were accountable when posting information to the course wiki, and recognized
the power that was entrusted to them in doing so. At the same time, they found this shared participation
to be beneficial. One student commented:
One thing I really liked about this course and felt was something that would be useful in other
courses too is the use of a class wiki. It was a good place to go, and it was nice to be able to edit
on a collaborative site than have a set page. It was also good to be able to put up interesting
information and be trusted with the opportunity to administer the site. It also helped build a sense
of responsibility and collective understanding. It exposed me to a lot of new ideas that I
otherwise wouldn’t have learned. [The wiki] was also a way to make the course more interactive
and hands on, which is something I think everyone enjoyed.
Conclusion
This paper describes techniques and pedagogical considerations when using a wiki to augment a
traditional course management system, and presents best practices for their use. Building a course
around the use of a wiki invites students to become involved in the process of creating course content
and sharing their knowledge with their classmates. The results of this study suggest that many first year
college students only have a cursory knowledge of what wikis are, and incorporating their use in the
classroom will add value not only to students’ studying and learning, but also to their potential success
as future knowledge workers and technology professionals.
Appendix.
A video tour of this class wiki is available online at http://www.screencast.com/t/GcMea6VP .
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Manuscript received 15 Sep 2007; revision received 28 May 2008.
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