WIKIs in Second Language Learning

What is a WIKI and how do I use it?

Before reading any of the information below, I invite you to watch a short and entertaining 3 minute video that demonstrates how WIKIs are used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

Wiki wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick" or "super-fast. Wikis are collaborative web sites that allow multiple authors to create and edit information on the web site.

Tips for using a Wiki:

1. Anyone can change anything. Wikis are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined.

2. Wikis use simplified hypertext markup: simplified webpage language, you do not need to know anything about webpage or web design to use a wiki.

3. WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether. Wiki page titles often eschew spaces to allow for quick page creation and automatic, markup-free links between pages within (and sometimes across) wiki systems.

4. Content is ego-less, time-less, and never finished. Anonymity is not required but is common. With open editing, a page can have multiple contributors, and notions of page "authorship" and "ownership" can be radically altered.

5. Wiki pages are rarely organized by chronology. They are most often organized by context, by links in and links out, and by whatever categories or concepts emerge in the authoring process.

Educational Uses for Wikis

Why are they important in education? Knowing how to learn and how to participate in creating new knowledge are increasingly essential life skills. Knowledge-building networks aim to engage groups in producing new knowledge, advancing the frontiers of knowledge of the group. Wikis establish a community of learning and allow students to use other people and learners as an important resource. Wikis may be the beginning of a way to offer a collaborative learning opportunity for online Technology Education students while incorporating the component of service learning. Online learning supports a collaborative learning model, which is comprised of the elements of presence, collaboration, reflective/transformative learning, technology, social constructivism, and interaction/communication that shape collaboration and a sense of community.

A few different ways Wikis have been used in educational environments:

1. Sketchpads and Brainstorming: create updated lists or collections of links as an informal bulletin board.

2. Meeting planning: a provisional agenda is drawn up and the URL for the wiki is sent to the participants, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda serves as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online, allowing the participants or anybody else to review and annotate the proceedings.

3. Build reference lists and outlines: brainstorm instructional strategies and suggestions.

4. New Job Postings: store and organize content for a major new job posting and career development Web site that it is developing.

5. Planning a conference: collect supporting resources and to gather contributions from invited participants. Use wikis during the conference, live, with laptops and wireless access, to record group work. Following the conference, participants subsequently edit their collaborations.

6. Educational Research: Graduate courses employ wikis as a support for collaborative experiments in composition and as a prompt for reflection on the nature of online writing and reading.

7. Authors: upload manuscripts of their novels to incorporate the best edits and suggestions into the next draft of the book. Readers can also save alternative chapters and related pages.

8. Writing Instruction: At Teaching Wiki (http://teachingwiki.org), Joe Moxley, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, lists a number of the medium’s strengths for the teaching of writing skills: wikis invigorate writing ("fun" and "wiki" are often associated); wikis provide a low-cost but effective communication and collaboration tool (emphasizing text, not software); wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts; In addition to fostering the development of writing skills as they are already understood, wikis may prove to be invaluable for teaching the rhetoric of emergent technologies.

9. Network literacy: teaching students the meaning and how to write in a collaborative environment.

10. Constructivist teaching philosophy: To truly empower students within collaborative or co-constructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities. The instructor’s role shifts to that of establishing contexts or setting up problems to engage students. In a wiki, the instructor sets the initial task and the students work as a collaborative group.

11. Academic Projects: students with common service projects can share ideas, relate the theories, concepts, and methodologies to the e-service, and assist one another in brainstorming and problem solving.

12. Case Study Research Methods: chosen for conducting the case study, and the following section analyzes the results.

Some of my favorite quotes

“Even confirmed technophobes have grasped and mastered the system quickly. The structure of wikis is shaped from within—not imposed from above. Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure”(Lamb, 2004).

"SoftSecurity,"(Lamb, 2004) relies on the community, rather than technology, to enforce order.

“Characteristic of the wiki’s irreverent attitude, the front page announces that those who do not wish to "edit, erase, enhance, beautify, dullify, nullify, derange, arrange, or simply change" the wiki space should "then accept the fact that [they] will always be complacent, and easily controlled." Then, presumably, they should just go away” (Lamb, 2004).

Want to try out you WIKI skills? Here's the web address to my WIKI that I have started as a means of practice just for you!

http://technologysecondlanguagelearning.wikispaces.com/