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Interview
The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed
8/20/2008
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Mader maintains a blog and other information on wikis at his Web site, www.ikiw.org.
In this first half of a two-part interview, Mader talks about powerful ways to use wikis in education, content ownership issues, and how wikis tend to be used--and why.
Campus Technology: Specifically, how can colleges and universities use wikis to enhance learning?
Stewart: In higher ed, there are really three ways I think a wiki can be useful: teaching, research, and administration.
The usefulness in teaching comes from two things. First, teachers can work together using a wiki to write curriculum and lesson plans for courses, to develop assignments, and so forth. If you have multiple teachers teaching sections of a course and they need to teach from the same materials, they have a central hub to which they can collaboratively contribute material ... and then from which they can teach and keep all their sections.
For students, wikis are beneficial primarily as a collaborative tool for things like group assignments in courses. When I taught a chemistry lab years ago, I used a wiki to have students write collaborative lab reports. [Before the wiki, I had] 30 students in a lab where each student does an experiment and writes a report. You get 30 reports and 30 introductions and 30 methods and materials and 30 conclusions and so forth. Grading and evaluating that work becomes more about just getting through the pile on your desk than about really providing students in-depth feedback.
And for the students, I don't think they learn as much that way because they're focused on getting the thing done and turned in on time, and they're just repeating the same process over and over.
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