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"As an intensely social, collaborative and inquisitive species, dependent on each other for survival, this sharing of ideas in a relatively small group - about ourselves, about other people, about eventspast and possible events to come - is the very stuff of our humanity." ~ John Abbott.
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| Creative Commons License: Dominic Alves |
Spiderman vs Heroes - Group strength is better
Collaboration is the one word that keeps cropping up again and again when reading about wikis. Never having collaborated on a web-based project, it's hard for me to imagine what this process will look like. I'm very much a "do it yourself and it will be done the way you like it" girl. This probably stems from the many years of being the student everyone else relied on to get things done. Sharing ideas isn't hard, but sharing a final product is like trying to emotionally shed spider webs. Once glued by strings of ownership, it's hard to unstick oneself and let someone else add threads, for fear the whole web will come apart. The trick is to remember that the more strings, particularly anchor strings, the stronger the web. By learning from my peers, I see how strengthened my professional growth is, but I also see how I grow as a person by allowing myself to let go of the control and learn from the process.
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Discovering Wikis - Slinging a line
Wiki (the Hawaiian word for "quick") writing, by virtue of it's easily editable page creation, allows for a single user or multiple users to create web-based documents for any number of purposes. The most highly used wiki and most familiar to web users is Wikipedia - the web-based encyclopedia with thousands of editors. The collaborative nature of the entries in Wikipedia has been a source of frustration and celebration in sharing the world of knowledge available today. The frustration, for editors and users alike, lies in determining the authority of the myriad entries. Because Wikipedia's vulnerability to malicious or mischievous edits, there have been reports that editors are being reduced and restrictions are being put in place. ( Wall Street Journal Article ) However, the immense size of Wikipedia and the thirst for basic information about emerging topics that are not traditionally covered in encyclopedia mean that thousands must contribute for the venture to be successful. Trying to weave a web of the size of Wikipedia requires many threads and many weavers. Looking at smaller wikis makes the process more easily imagineable. Professional wikis (as described by Berger and Trexler) that have helped me imagine how my own wikis will function and appeal visually include Tracy Poelzer's Wonderful Web 2.0 (an electronic portfolio) and School Learning Commons by David Loertscher, Carol Koechlin and Sandy Zwaan (a portal and resource aggregator). Both of these sites are frequently updated and are immensely useful to me in my practice. While I haven't contributed to either, I find them fascinating and admire the courage of those who add to the wikis. As with many Facebook friends or list serves, I find myself "lurking," often due to time constraints and prioritization of tasks.
Collaboration is a term that education reformers have been using more and more frequently in the last ten years. Indeed, in 1997, Judith Sandholtz edited an oft-cited book, Teaching with technology: Creating student-centered classrooms, which called upon educators to incorporate technology to improve student learning and engagement through collaborative projects. Business leaders and politicians frequently cite the need for today's students to be able to work collaboratively in the business environment. Wikis provide just such an environment and several wiki service providers have focused on the education market to give educators an easy and safe way to protect student privacy. PB Works provides specific space for educators and provides tutorials to educators beginning to use wikis for the first time. Over the course of several days, tutorials are mailed out to the wiki creator to assist in creating the wiki. It is relatively easy to start creating pages, but templates are very limited in the free model. Adding a background colour to a page can't be done unless you are able to use HTML code. Adding images requires some searching and practice, but gets easier with practice. Mostly, the focus is on adding text. In the free model, the number of text types is limited, as are the sizes. Privacy settings to ensure student safety are very good, so this might be a good wiki site to begin working with senior students in a more text-based environment or academic focus. This has been a site I have been trying to work with in Firefox to create a wiki for the Sa-Hali Manga Club. It has proven surprisingly frustrating as I try to embed images at school in Linux. Because the site doesn't work easily in Linux with Firefox 2.0, uploading images has been next to impossible, but even in Firefox 3.0, when working at home, embedding a Voki avatar (in anime style) took much longer than anticipated as I had to search through all the sidebar tools until I got to the last "other" file type. Because it has taken me a while to set up the initial space to invite students to, it has dimmed some of the students' initial excitement about sharing. Wikispaces is a simpler site to work in with tabs at the top and direct instructions immediately upon opening an account. It is easy to embed images and animations and somewhat easier to edit text (with more options in fonts) and change colours. I like that Wikispaces uses HTML code for colours, although it gives you dots on a colour wheel to change hues. Wikispaces also uses icons to indicate topics in the management page, which I find easier to work with.
The only issue is actually getting students involved with these pages. I have yet to see for myself how student collaboration will work, but take it on the authority of my classmates that these tools truly do make collaboration easily possible. (TLKirsten's Learning Chrysalid and To Boldly Go... inspire me, in particular.) It will be interesting to see how the Manga Club will move into using a wiki to share their work and the links to their favourite materials. As this is an extra-curricular project, some of the guidelines (Berger and Trexler, 2010.) will necessarily be modified, although citing sources and respect of others' work will be key in any school-based project.
A wiki that I began several weeks ago as a continuation of the discussion around Web 2.0 tools in instruction may have more success that student projects. Our staff participated in two workshops as part of our professional development focus on educational technology. As part of the workshop, I suggested that we continue sharing our successes and struggles as we work with a few of the tools. As a reminder of the discussion, three staff members have agreed to share what has happened in their use of technology in the classroom on the staff wiki and it will be presented at the next staff meeting. Knowing that my colleagues are incredibly busy and particularly stressed this year, I can't begin to guess how many will participate, but it is something that can be built upon in the coming years.
Getting wound up
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| Attribution License: Ali Smiles:) from Flickr |
Works Cited
Abbott, J. (2010). Overschooled but undereducated: how the crisis in education is jeopardizing our
adolescents.. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Angwin, J., & Fowler, G. (2009, November 23). Volunteers Log Off As Wikipedia Ages. Wall Street
Journal - Eastern Edition, p. A1. Retrieved from MasterFILE Premier database.
Berger, P., & Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world.
Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.
Sandholtz, J.H., Ringstaff, C., & Dwyer, D.C. (1997). Teaching with technology: creating student
centered classrooms. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
