The Kiss of Wiki

The simplicity of the Wiki concept as a guideline for developping and providing virtual learning environments

BeatDoebeli, MarcPilloud, PhilippSchaufelberger

Paper to be presented at Euro Education 2003 (Feb 2003) in Aalborg

keywords: CSCW, CSCL, Wiki,

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Open Questions and Incitations From:

• Marc Pilloud
  • Isn't there missing a input about Learning Theorie Background (Constructivisme). Something like: Wiki is good for constructivistic learnig. It's not the best in all cases it's not the best in case of instructional learning but it's realy good for ….. Source?
  • I'm missing meta information, about the lengsth of the paper, the lengsth of the presentation, the target audiance.
  • Problem or Motivation : There could only be one teacher who wins the attention of the pupils in freetime.
  • New Idea: InitiativeWikiVorlagen

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Paper abstract:

After explaining the Wiki Concept we present our experiences with the open source implementation TWiki in university, secondary school and teacher education in a few classes and courses in Switzerland. From these and experiences made by others with Wiki in education we draw two conclusions:

1. For the next few years the simplicity of Wiki can facilitate the integration of ICT in education by lowering the technical entrance barrier.
2. In a longer-term view, the simplicity of wiki can serve as a design guide line: Give teachers and students basic resources and let them use these without anticipating fully how they will use them.

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Problem

How should learning environments look like?

We present Wiki as a tool suitable for quick collaboration in school. After a description of the Wiki concept we … our experiences in various schulstufen. From this experiences we …

The Wiki Concept

The Wiki Principle was invented by Ward Cunningham 1994 … (Quelle: b01094)

• Webserver on which every page can be edited by everyone
• Editing is done directly in the web browser, no additional software is needed
• Internal Linking is done by WikiWords, eg. Words with more than one nonadjacent Capitals
• No HTML knowlede is needed for simple layout, linking or structuring.

There are several Wiki products available as Open Source developments with various enhancements in functionality and programmed in different programming languages (Swiki alias CoWeb, ZWicki ,TWiki). A list of Wiki clones can be found under ….

Wikis in Education

• CoWeb Experiences at Georgia Tech (Quellen: …) (mostly university level?)
• Mostly either university level or computer science classes
• Very few wiki experiences mentioned in Europa (überprüfen!)

Our Experiences with TWiki

Compared with CoWeb experience at Georgia Tech (Quellen: ) our experience is very small. Nevertheless we find it important to introduce the education use of wikis in Europe and share our experience in non-university environments.

We use TWiki, an Open Source Wiki Clone (www.twiki.org) since automn 2002 in several school environments:

• Secondary school: History, staatskunde and philosophy at Kantonsschule Sursee (Switzeland)
• University: project management for computer science students at ETH Zurich (Switzerland)
• Teacher education: ICT education for teachers at secondary schools in Kanton Luzern (Switzerland)

Our Experiences

• Simplicity:
  • No clientside installation needed: To participate and publish on a wiki platform no tools have to be installed on the clients. All the user needs is a form-capable web browser.
  • No HTML Know-How needed: The layout features of wiki platforms are small compared to text processors or HTML editors. But users don't have to learn much layout syntax to use a wiki platform.
  • → Conclusion: The Wiki principle takes 10 Minutes to explane to students. After this short introduction students are able to use the basic functions of a wiki and produce web pages. Learning by doing and learning by examples of others replaces more teacher explanations. Caveat: Average teachers need more than 10 minutes... (ausführen)

• Teamwork
  • among students: Students help each other an a wiki: They correct each others typos or help each other with homework.
  • among teachers: The ease of Wiki to connect topics make collaboration between teachers of differnt subjects more easy. A teacher of history and a teacher of german language began to develop a timeline together where historical facts and literatur could be inserted. This teamwork didn't need much arrangement or preparation, it just happend (ja, Philipp, so ist es übertrieben, beschreib es besser...)

• Motivation Bsp. Griechische Mythologie

• Teacher as coach This is not a new experience, but …. With Wiki the role of the teacher changes. He is now longer … but a coach of the students. In a technical view, the voice of the teacher has not more importance than the voices of the students.

Conclusions

• Shortterm conclusion: Wiki as collaboration tool der Wahl because of its simplicity: It makes possible
  • The use of CSCW in normal lessons without starting a great project
  • The use of CSCW without putting technology in front of content
  • The use of CSCW for teachers without above-average ICT KnowHow

• Medium range conclusion: In the development of learning environment we should
  • look for simplicity
  • do not try to anticipate all future uses of technology
  • do not restrict possibilities

Literature

• [DP01] Doebeli Honegger, Beat and Pilloud, Marc: One Notebook per Teacher A sustainable concept for wide ICT integration in school, provocative paper presented at SEC III (Open IFIP-GI-Conference on Social, Ethical and Cognitive Issues of Informatics and ICT) on July 23, 2001 in Dortmund, Germany
• [GRK01] Guzdial, Marc, Rick, Jochen and Kehoe, Colleen: Beyond Adoption to Invention, Teacher-Created Collaborative Activities in Higher Education, t02237
• [LC01] Leuf, Bo and Cunningham, Ward: The Wiki Way, Addison Wesley 2001 b01094

-- BeatDoebeli - 01 Dec 2002