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This week, I attended a very insightful seminar on using wikis in a university course. Patricia Abbot is lecturer and course co-ordinator for Theology, Psychology and Human Experience at the Canberra campus of the Australian Catholic University and, earlier this semester, she decided to use a wiki as an assessment item in her course.

For the assignment, students were asked to buddy-up and then develop a wikispace around a particular topic. Patricia described her experiences with using wikis in class during the seminar, but she also invited a student, Fiona, along to report on the learner’s perspective.

Here are some findings:

Student perspective

• WetPaint was the wiki application used by the class. The application itself worked fine, but students were frustrated by how different web browsers viewed and supported their wikis.
• Most students worked up their content in MS Word and then did a copy-and-paste into the wiki itself. As a consequence, much of students’ document formatting was lost, especially if they’d used Endnote to create footnotes.
• Students met early on, in their pairs, to discuss the wikispace they would build, but then worked on their ‘own’ bits individually.
• Fiona said she enjoyed the task, but felt that teacher expectations needed to be made clearer up front.
• The 1200-word limit set by the teacher for the assignment was almost impossible to keep to.
• Students weren’t sure how to reconcile the informality of a web-based format such as a wiki, with the formality of the essay format, which they were more used to.

Teacher perspective

• Patricia used herself as a benchmark: knowing that she is reluctant to learn a new communication medium, Patricia felt that if she could learn to use a wiki fairly quickly, then just about anyone could. In the end, Patricia felt she misjudged this.
• Some students struggled with the medium, but Patricia felt that they just needed more practice, not that the wiki itself was hard to use.
• Patricia also made the point that we don’t stop having orals, just because some students aren’t good at orals: we expect them to master the medium of the oral presentation, and it’s the same with any other media, including wikis.
• The idea was to have students use the medium as it’s meant to be used: as a collaboration space for students to build their understanding of the topic. But the fact that students did their work separately from each other, in Word, annulled the value of the wiki as a collaborative tool.
• Teachers need to plan for problems.
• Students need explicit learning experiences in how to use the medium for their learning.

Some further points came out of the discussion:

• Perhaps referencing and citation needs to be thought of differently in this context — students were trying to import footnotes from Word, when more creative ways of dealing with formatting and academic rigour could have been found.
• Students probably need more, ongoing support from the teacher in how to use a wiki (or any other new learning technology) than they are currently getting.

I’ll be interviewing Patricia for EdCom in the coming weeks, so look out for a podcast on the topic soon. Patricia has also kindly made her own reflections on the project via a pdf document (PDF, 316 KB).