Nov
30
Wikis in Education : Pubic, Semi-Public or Private – Which is Best?
November 30, 2007 |
Online Educa 2007 - Session 1c November 29
Speaker – Sarah Guth, University of Padua
This related to a project to see whether there were advantages to fully public or semi-public wikis over closed ones.
In reviewing why people might use these technologies it was clear that they enable communications between people and organisations and if this was the object why should it be lock in system?
The benefits of wikis were seen to be about collective authoring, the issue of Individual vs collective ownership, that the content was ego-less, time-less, never finished, material is publishing on line and the exploration of writing as a process. All these benefits are further enhanced by being public rather than being closed/semi closed
The research hypotheses included the idea that students will gain greater benefits, responsibility etc by using public wikis. The students used were from the last year in learning languages and not technologically ‘enabled’. When working on wikis the student work cycles on public and semi public were similar but different – on public wikis there was more interaction and with people they didn’t know.
The conclusions on public wikis were that they promoted collaboration beyond the classroom, increased responsibility and more accurate writing, and that knowledge sharing gave students a sense of empowerment. The drawbacks included the pressure of writing in someone else’s wiki, frustration of having contents edited by an unknown user, lack of confidence to edit contents and structure, and the frustration of having content altered
