Monday, April 25, 2011

Student collaborative learning with wikis

Moreover, much research suggests that students learn better in a collaborative environment when compared to competitive or individualistic environments. Encountering diverse perspectives is beneficial to learning. Groups of learners also share their cognitive resources (e.g., working memory), which are very limited in individuals.

Wikis are web tools that make it easy to collaborate. The idea of a wiki is a collection of webpages that anyone can edit with an easy-to-use online editor. The key idea of a wiki is that for any page, anyone can make a change. In order to make that work, wikis maintain history lists of the pages that are changed. If someone messes up the page, it's easy to simply revert back to a previous page in the history.

By far the best-known wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Like all wikis, Wikipedia entries can be edited by anyone. Early critics of wikis expected that the open model would result total chaos. However, we find in Wikipedia the world's most extensive encyclopedia with article quality rivaling the best edited encyclopedias. The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that the wiki notion that when anybody can edit quality can increase.

When wikis are used in the classroom, we find better writing as a result of improved integration of ideas due to collaboration. Classroom wikis foster writing in general and more thoughtful writing because entries must integrate what others say. Collaborative writing with wikis places more emphasis on organization of ideas due to the structure of wiki pages.

Classroom wikis are designed for classroom use so often include features not available in open-to-the-public wikis like Wikipedia. For example, classroom wikis are often password-protected to prevent people from outside the class from making edits. In some cases, teachers may choose to restrict the wikis so that even reading them is password-protected.

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Keywords: wikis, collaborative learning