Wikis for education

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This Recent Changes Camp Canberra 2011 session was attended by nine people to discuss use of wikis for educational purposes.

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## Wiki for education

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Jtneill asked to hear about how people use wikis with students.

Diane Phillips used wikis with students in marketing/social media:

* 2 out of 90 students objected to going public with their content (for these two they did a private journal marked by their tutor)
* 8 companies contacted about internships
* Students were very self-managing
* 3rd year UG students in Bachelor of Commerce

Tom Worthington:

* Taught two courses: Writing for the Web and Electronic Records
* Had them edit Wikipedia articles because it was easier to edit existing material than create their own text due to wiki markup etc.
* Public service employees
* Edited the pages about their organisation
* What about Wikiversity for educators?

Rob Fitzgerald

* What tools do we have for examining the process (e.g., qualitative and quantitative contributions) e.g. for assessment? We currently don't have particularly useful tools.
* Face to face editing class (despite edit conflicts) got things flowing

Ben Rattray

* This is not dissimilar to group assignments - we now have a collaboration tool, that's all.
* Groups of students creating resources on different topics.
* Make sure in tutorial environment that they understand recent changes, history etc. so they understand what's going on.

James Neill

* Dedicated lecture early in semester on "how to use wiki" - emphasis on "leap in", you can't break it, have a go, then you'll learn and work it out - hit the edit button.

Kirsty - Tasmanian Polytechnic

* Building student portfolios
* Turn around time much quicker for remote students (compared to printed workbooks - send, mark, send back etc.)
* A surprise: Creation of a single community between remote and on-campus students
* Used wikispaces with subpages and a templating system - wikispaces is almost WYSIWIG but not quite. Some discussion about Mediawiki not being WYSIWIG.

Guy with a beard - Uni of SA

* Problem with adding teaching content on Wikiversity because employer wants to own content.

Oops battery ran out - went to handwritten notes.