Learning by wiki
The concept of using wikis for collaborative learning by doing is not new.
There are many projects out there busy having a go, perhaps most notably Wikiversity, but also in lots of schools etc.
There are some pretty straightforward digital education reasons to do it -
- a wiki is a controlled, simplified version of the web that helps with
- learning about sharing knowledge and information
- learning about collaboration and co-learning
- learning about publishing and consuming content
- learning about the wider web
- a wiki is a way to connect content that helps with
- individual learning
- community learning
- contextual learning
- learning by doing
- cross-fertilisation
- a wiki is a way to connect a community that helps
- build a collective culture
- develop expertise, responsibility and ownership
- grow collective knowledge
- generate innovation
- a wiki is more or less what many people do at work ... share their skills & talents
But there are also some significant questions to address -
So there are two sides to Learning by wiki -
- learning by the individual students/teachers/parents etc
- institutional learning about learning by wiki
Part of point of the {!ctf} extension on this wiki is to generate the sort of dataset that can shine a light on some of these questions.
The traffic passing along links is used to deliver Related Pages, Personal Recommendations etc, and this clickstream data builds into timeseries that can be analysed to observe things like engagement, overlap, precision, convergence & divergence. Flows through links within the text, and those put there by the extension, can be compared so there is an element of "control". This can be related to other timeseries data the school might have available to it (e.g. see Monitoring the school's progress).
An important goal of using a wiki could be to produce some useful research in this important area.
