While I am still grappling with the use of a blog, I do believe assigning Wikis for adult learning collaboration has its benefits. According to Hazari, North, and Moreland (2009), “Wikis can promote collaboration in group assignments, encourage negotiation, and make students comfortable with new generation of technology tools” as well as allowing students to build collectively on classmates’ knowledge (p. 195). It is true that I have only been involved in one Wiki assignment; however, it was a positive experience with valuable learning opportunity. Not only did I obtain a new technology, I was able to effectively collaborate with a classmate and gain knowledge on the subject matter at hand.
Wikis are not only being used in educational environments, but for workplace learning also. According to Lee and Bonk (2014), corporations are using Wikis as a way “to enhance their production efficiencies and knowledge management” (p. 15). Examples include corporate training, engineering projects, and research.
Although Wikis do allow for ease of editing collaborative work, one item to consider is the reluctance to change work of classmates or coworkers. Balztersen (2010) found in his research that many students felt a sense of inadequacy or a feeling of wrongness when editing or adding to work that the originator considered finished.
All in all, I am a believer in the power of the Wiki for adult learning, especially Wikis integrated within Learning Management Systems (LMS). This allows for all users to be authorized and the integrity of the institution or corporation maintained and under the control of LMS site managers (Forment, De Pedro, Jose Casan, Piguillem, & Galanis, 2012).
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Baltzersen, R. K. (2010). Radical transparency: Open access as a key concept in wiki pedagogy. Australasion Journal of Educational Technology, 26, 791-809. Retrieved from ajet.org.au
Forment, M. A., De Pedro, X., Jose Casan, M., Piguillem, J., & Galanis, N. (2012, October-December). Wikis in collaborative educational scenarios: Integrated in LMS or standalone wikis? International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 10, 72-81. Retrieved from lib.k-state.edu
Hazari, S., North, A., & Moreland, D. (2009). Investigating pedagogical value of wiki technology. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20, 187-198. Retrieved from lib.k-state.edu
Good post Robin! I have to agree with your pros in Wiki use. In my experience, wiki’s do promote collaboration, and more specifically, negotiation. I have also found wikis to provide clarity for me as well. When collaborating with others, I have found that by listening (or reading!) someone else’s interpretation of the same material can provide additional insight I haven’t previously considered. On the con side, I have experienced reluctance to edit another’s work beyond grammatical or spelling errors, however, my reluctance did invite more in depth collaboration by prompting a discussion I may not have had. The mere fact that editing was an option, caused me to attend more to what was being said or presented. Have you given any thought about how to overcome a student reluctance to edit content?
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ReplyDeleteRobin - The wiki can be a powerful tool when considering the advancement of a research idea. The wiki allows researchers to come together from potentially far away, and communicate and collaborate on their topic of interest/ As a tool for research, according to West and West (2009), wiki pages are dynamic and allow participants to add to and even change or delete someone else's contribution (p. 4). This along with the idea that a wiki creates a more organized environment with the non linear grouping of ideas and writing creates a more realistic environment for the exchange of ideas from a larger group of participants.
ReplyDeleteMy own experience using a wiki type product came to me as an Assistant Principle in 2006. As administrators, at our bi-weekly staff meetings, we came together to share what had been happening, news from around the district, and upcoming events and items of interest from our assistant or head superintendent. As you can assume, our schedules as school administrators tended to be quite hectic, leaving only the virtual environment for a chance for us to "gather" and discuss our schools. We used Google Docs as a means to share, edit, and view important school related documents. This created a time savings for us, and absenteeism at our staff meetings went down since we could attend these virtual meetings from the comfort of our own offices in our schools. It was really a time saver, once we all became accustomed to the Google Doc format.
West, L.S. & West, M.L. (2009). Using wikis for Online Collaboration. San Francisco, CA: Joseyy Bass Pub.
Robin, I appreciate your informative post. Both the content and the natural flow of information were very helpful and thought provoking. I agree with your comment about wikis in the workplace. Knowledge management is a major consideration for many work environments, maybe especially those work places with a distributed workforce, which seems to be becoming the norm, even in higher education. In fact, I directly supervise four offsite employees and another four indirectly.
ReplyDeleteMolecule, Hasan, Willis, Pfaff and Qi (2009) suggest that the process of building a database knowledge management system can be daunting, costly, time consuming and ultimately abandoned from disuse and non-acceptance. Meloche, et al. (2009) also posit that a wiki, on the other hand, which can be authored by multiple employees who are encouraged to share differing viewpoints to ultimately come to consensus, has a better chance of actually being used to encourage innovative work.
One of my work goals for 2015 is to better engage my teleworking staff and improve their experience as distance workers. I will give wiki consideration in helping to achieve this goal.
Reference
Meloche, J.A., Hasan, H. Willis, D, Pfaff, C. and Qi, Y. (2009). Cocreating corporate knowledge with a wiki. Journal of knowledge management, 5(2), 33-50.