Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Teaching, Learning, and Other Uses for Wikis in Academia

Teaching, Learning, and Other Uses for Wikis in Academia
All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal
By Jude Higdon, Project Manager
The Center for Scholarly Technology
University of Southern California
Complete story at Campus Technology:


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A Learning is For Everyone, Inc. article recommendation.


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Like many academic technology groups at campuses around the country, the Center for Scholarly Technology (CST) at USC has been wrestling with how to implement various types of social software, such as blogs and wikis, in the classroom. Over the past few years we have found some very good uses for blogs, including peer-reviewed journaling, Just-in-Time Teaching (Novak, et al, 1999), and meta-cognitive reflective practice. While we hit a few stumbling blocks early on, we seemed to be coming to some level of sophistication and adoption with the use of blogs as tools for enhancing teaching and learning as we entered into the 2005-2006 school year.

Use of wikis in the classroom has proved more elusive. While we never like to advocate the use of technology as an end of itself, our group saw great potential in the affordances of the wiki for teaching and learning. Students co-constructing meaning in a democratized digital space has a certain social constructivist (Bandura, 1976) elegance. And yet we struggled to impart this sense of potential to our faculty collaborators. By and large, people didn't seem ready for the freewheeling, uncontrolled wiki environment.

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Learning is For Everyone, Inc. is a nonprofit 501 C(3) organization whose goal is to provide information resources on the web and assistance through its activities in all aspects of education from cradle to nursing home!

3 comments:

monica said...

El Dorado Secondary School is investigating the possibility of adding sixth form classes. With the introduction of Communication Studies I am sure that the wiki can be useful even though I have not yet seen the syllabus.
Monica Ganpat.

radheka said...

from radheka
the wiki is a good idea especially
with all the fast changes taking place in our education system.We, at Gasparillo Composite School are thinking of starting Technology Education at our school but we need some assistance in terms of curriculum, equiptment and training for our teachers.
Radheka Ramsumair-Mahabir.11.45 p.m.

yasmin said...

from yasmin
on monday the 9th january 2006,a company from arima visited my school, ASJA Girls' College' San Fernando and was promoting education online for the school. a fantastic opportunity for our school but at a cost of near 40,000 TT.
So we teachers have decided to use / create wiki to enrich our curriculum.