Throughout the course the idea of collaborative working was developed - both from the theory side and also from the practical side. The idea of the hyper-text essay was introduced in week 4 and this led to thinking about taking the idea of collaboration further whereby the final product was in itself a resource that could be shared (and indeed could be taken forward by others). A weblog could be used for this but this tool felt very much more like an individual doing the work and allowing others to comment, rather than all contributing fairly. Wikis have been used as a collaboration tool within the CO community of the University (e.g. used as a documentation area during the development of the University Managed Desktop Project https://adelie.ucs.ed.ac.uk/dstwiki/) but not in teaching as far as we are aware. Therefore we thought it would be useful to study this area in more depth for the assignment and in particular to:-
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See also Notepad
Six quick comments (from Marielle's email - I thought these were good starters and something to get thought going):
I really liked the paper of I forgot who (we had to read in week 3 or 4) on the collaborative hypertext exercise. I really believe that students have a lot to bring to academia. In the present format, they submit an essay, that essay is marked, then stored in some file system. The knowledge they have acquired is lost. I am teaching (among other things) at master levels. I have students writing me excellent essays. That's a pity others cannot benefit of their knowledge and analyses.
With my master students, I know propose a double submission format, this gives me the opportunity to go and check up that there is not important problem before they submit the final one (they do not receive any mark for the first submission, only comments, but all my students decided to submit it). A wiki may help me check them up more regularly (though I am not sure I want to do that, because that's time consuming). A wiki may help them benefit better from each other work (go and read the other person work, comment it, suggests improvements).
You can use the wiki to encourage reflective learning. You post a paper on the web, you ask students to comment on the weaknesses. You can use it to teach essay skills too. You publish a quite poor essay, you challenge the students to improve it. You have them do it collaboratively (I guess, that's then content management more than wiki) and justify any change they make by referring to a marking sheet you have given them (or criterion you have specified).
In medicine, I had been tutor for a 4th year tutorial group. They have the students design a small website on a specific topic of their own choosing. Still, in the current format, they operate by giving each student one page to edit… which means that there is a lot of difference in style and consistency through the website. Better cooperative work could be achieved with a wiki.
One of the first use of the wiki, was for encyclopedia… again, an encyclopedia could be created that would be refined, year after year by students, updated with new references, eventually reorganized as a function of new findings. (In fact, I was thinking that would be an excellent idea for academics to create such a resource).
I have a project of putting lexical databases on the web. Tutorials will be attached. I saw wiki as a good way to structure these tutorials… for the same reasons… so that everybody can easily benefit from the “hints” and “tricks” known by other users.
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This is some thoughts from me on how we should draw things together and as you will see I keep changing/modifying my thoughts…JP.
keep everything we have somewhere; as it shows how we actually worked on it (including Notepads; with note on purpose/use).
front page should maybe be nothing but a series of links?
this I'm adding after having done the rest but thoughts are something like a summary/thoughts on each section (i've put in some ideas to get this started) with a link to our work in getting there (existing pages). (or this is 2nd thoughts again that we put something like a line across the page and have our existing pages below this rather than seperate pages - I'm thinking server load in that machine web server is on is old and slow).
Short drawing together of thoughts/findings
Need brief why/how… some mention of wiki versus blogs? Wonder if we should include own personal motivations on this (each do a wee paragraph) ? Link in here your stuff that I did a cut and paste job off from our initial email exchange.
Brief description of who we carried this out (should include me having responsibilty for initally getting the wiki up and running, you taking excellent hold of how we actually went about it) - I think we should link this to our existing page that gives more details and gives feel for approach/how we collaborated on how we did carried the exercise out? Should we mention that other than really technical issues we stayed within the medium.. Also could call on others who had helped out (i.e. Paul to contribute directly into the medium?)
Paul and my stuff probably straight from what is there at present?
Summary of our findings and again link in our exisiting page
I see main things here as:-
what is a wiki - web-based content management system (
CMS)
collaborative website using forms to create and edit web pages easily
collection of work from number of authors (c.f. blogs that are largely individual with others commenting on what written rather than having the opportunity to add/delete/modify
has search and revision control
combination of web services in one easily installed application (not quite sure what this means but…)
Again same model of summary and link to existing page
Stealing your headings:-
Again same model of summary and link to existing page
Thoughts on what to include
need to get ref but the early reference we had on the course about different models of learning; thoughts about move away from “spoon-feeding” to faciliation of knowledge - wikis fostering this goal??
learn by what we do
building a collaborative resource for future use (my thoughts)
Same pattern…
Again stealing your headings:-
easy to use, but requires somebody with technical skills for installing it
vulnerability relies on the good-will, vandalism can easily take place
legal issues (FEDRA - is there an equivalent body in the UK with the same authority?)
learning curve - from a student prospective I wonder if this will go down as they use this kind of thing from an earlier stage (still relatively young)
lack of standards - this is only really for exchange of wiki pages; I like the freedom that each different one has rather then rigidity enforced..
can't do everything (but what can?)
requires change in teachers role - become facilitator
require to have good atmosphere where group dynamics work so that can feel happy editing others work!
creditability
look and feel not exciting - but then does make easier for novice to get started…
spell checker (personal BIG problem, today rely on this!)
need “driver”/focussed
problem of providing individual marks to collaborative work (as this now just really possible its early days..)
IP rights - again..
<include anything we found personally - for me simple to use but sometimes didn't behave way expected..>
Same pattern
integration of wiki/blogs/newsgroups
incorporation of audio/video
additional extensions (webdav)
changes in modes of authorising (academia and business)
Same pattern
administration for student exchange
maintaining documents that need frequent updating such as policy and procedure manuals
become a workplace - proposals/reports allowing collegues to comment/add to it all in one place
during talks can take notes on a wiki at the time, share with other afterwards and build up a collaborative notebook
java developers documentation/work in progress
Wonder whether a section each on this; would be nice to then discuss what we thought directly on the wiki but let us see about time??
How do we do this - I'm tempted to stay with a simple approach to say that we have embedded in the references in each section and then have the existing list of links/references and say that things to follow up - after all the power of wikis is it never ends (but does anything?)