Advances in E-learning-Experiences and Methodologies

E-Learning 2.0
immediate, equal access to the most recent
version of the document for all group members
(Pearce, 2006).
- Track a group project. Considering students’
busy schedules, a wiki is very useful
for tracking and completing group projects. It
allows group members to track their research
and ideas from anywhere with Internet access,
helps them save time by seeing what
sources others have already checked, and
gives them a central place to collectively
prepare the final product.
According to Pearce (2006), one way to do
this is to give each group a wiki page in which
to write a paper, and give each member of
the group a separate page to track his/her
research and ideas for the paper. The “paper”
page lets you see how the group is working
collaboratively, and individual pages let you
track how each group member is developing
contributions to the paper, and gives you a
place to leave feedback and suggestions for
each student.
• Tracking progress in your research group.
Teachers can use the wiki in order to maintain
a journal of work performed on group
projects.
• Information repositories or teacher-librarians.
For example, the SUNY Geneseo
Collaborative Writing Project at the State
University of New York that consists in
a Dictionary of Literary Terms (Schacht,
2006).
• Review and debate classes and teachers.
Students at Brown University have started
the Course Advisor Wiki, a place for students
to collaboratively write reviews of courses
they have taken. This wiki gives reviewers
flexibility to articulate their impressions,
while readers get richer reviews that combine
multiple impressions and perspectives.
Rhetoric and Composition course at Penn
State University uses a wiki for students to
tell about their experiences during the class
and leave advice for the next group.
• Presentations. Some people are using a
wiki instead of conventional presentation
software, like Keynote and PowerPoint.
• Social interaction. Wikis have been used
successfully to enable hundreds of students
to participate in a collaborative icebreaker
exercise at Deakin University. This project
illustrates how e-learning practitioners
can use wiki technology to enhance social
interaction amongst students online (Augar,
Raitman, & Zhou, 2004).
• Planning a conference. An academic
research unit at the University of British
Columbia used a wiki for planning a technoculture
conference, in order to collect supporting
resources and gather contributions
from invited participants. They used the
wiki during the conference to record group
work. Participants subsequently edited their
collaborative authorings, resulting in a
“conference proceedings” of an altogether
different sort.
Moreover, when attempting to develop studentcreated
wikis at the school, McPherson (2006)
recommends starting with easy-to-manage wiki
projects. For example, a possible wiki writing
project for primary-aged children is to create an
animal alphabet wiki. Individuals, pairs, or groups
of primary students can (a) choose an animal, (b)
select a picture of that animal from the Internet
and, (c) insert the picture and the first letter of the
animal into their wiki. Intermediate students can
use a wiki to create a story with multiple beginnings
and endings or, as another example, develop
their online and off-line map-reading and writing
skills by collaboratively adding descriptive text to
an online map, such as WikiMapia (www.wikimapia.org).
Secondary students can use a wiki to
create hyperlinks from an existing poem to pages
containing their own understandings or they can
even create their own collaborative poem.