Extending learning spaces with wikis
Lynne Gibb
Learning about wikis for training purposes
My work involves tutoring at a neighbourhood community house in Upper Ferntree Gully in Victoria, which is one of the more easterly suburbs of Melbourne.
The kind of delivery we give is generally face-to-face. We haven’t yet ventured out into the online delivery or even blended delivery, although that is just about to begin. Normally we teach a variety of accredited courses, some of which include children’s services, aged care, youth services, community development, lifestyle and leisure.
I think my interest in wikis stemmed from my involvement with the EDNA program, or the EDNA Group, where I first heard about wikis, and I began to think that perhaps there could be some use for them at a tutor level, such as an intra-tutor level for support and encouragement, collaboration, that type of thing. In the beginning I didn’t necessarily think about using wikis with students, so last year I began to be a partaker of the Learning Circles project that is put on by ATSIC in the ACE community and was funded to do some research. I chose research into wikis as my topic and vowed to learn all about them during the research and in doing so to set up a collaborative wiki as a support and resource centre for the tutors at Coonara Community House. The reason for that was the fact that we were all sessional tutors, we rarely get a chance to get together. It’s very, very difficult for our team leader to get us all in the same place at the same time to meet and for professional development and things like that. So I was trying to see whether a wiki could help to break down some of this isolation and also whether it could be a vehicle for us to do some reflective practice and generally look at a wide variety of issues that we weren’t able to do when we’re in our very rare sessions together.
So that’s how it started. From there I began to see that there could be a role for wikis in actual face-to-face classroom teaching to do some of the same job – for collaborations, for students working together on projects, for students who only come in once a week or once a fortnight or some that only come in once a month, as a way of them keeping in contact with each other and also as a way of increasing their technology skills – so that’s how it all began. I introduced wikis to a Diploma of Community Development class and I really just did it in a very small experimental way to see how they would take to it and it’s been a howling success.
The first trial with the student wiki was done in a very relaxed way really. I had allocated sessions to me with the students and we split the group and for the first term I took half of the group into the computer lab and we did technology and the other half did research with another tutor in another room and halfway through the session we swapped over. This way I had pretty much constant contact with the students and so I set up the wiki myself before I started, I introduced the students to the wiki, I got them to be members of the wiki, we talked about what they were, we explored a few different wikis, we had a look at some other wikis that had already been set up, we talked about how we could possibly use them as students and whether they could see any ideas themselves, and because this was done over a term, they had quite a while to think about how they would like to use the wiki and come back at me with ideas.
From informal conversations to peer review to collaborative projects
In the discussion forum I encouraged them to just merely keep in touch with each other and to support and encourage each other. The main thing I did was that every single person who contributed anything to that wiki, I made sure that I saw it and commented on it back on the wiki again, either on the discussion board or on a page of the wiki, and the more I did this the more they started to respond. That was how we started.
Then halfway into the term I suggested that maybe they might like to upload some of their work that they were working on so that they could look at each other’s work and comment on it and give each other feedback. Before we did this we went into the whole privacy issue, I let the students know that this was what we call a semi-protected site and that they were the only people who could put things onto the wiki, but other people, anybody really, could read what was on there. So it was entirely up to them whether they chose to put up their work or not. They could bring their work and discuss it with each other face-to-face, but if the wanted to they could upload some of their project plans and get some feedback from each other. I was quite surprised actually that five of them uploaded their project plans and asked for feedback from other students, and the feedback they got was absolutely brilliant, was very useful, very helpful feedback. The students who fed back to them, who hadn’t actually wanted to upload their own project plans, even though they couldn’t bring themselves to upload their own work, brought their work in and openly started asking the other students for feedback on their work. So I think that was a very positive thing to come out of the wiki.
I also had like a playground page on there where the students could just more or less put up anything they wanted, within reason. So they chatted to each other and talked about their social life etc etc and just kept in touch. That’s really what we used the wiki for at the beginning.
The wiki supplements their project work in the way that they have just begun to start collaborating on individual projects. So they have been put into teams and they are now starting to work on projects and upload information to each other, discuss things with each other, in the face-to-face environment such as in a computer lab, at the moment. Within the next week or so they will be finishing that and moving back out so that they have to continue doing their teamwork from home and they will hopefully be able to collaborate on their projects. Then they will combine and on a given date they will be giving a face-to-face presentation in their little teams as their assessment task for that project. So that’s the first team project that’s been tried at this point.
Supporting and engaging students
The Certificate 2 and 3 in Community Work wiki has been very, very successful. The tutor who set this up was trained by me and she became extremely enthusiastic about things and set up a wiki for these students. I suggested to her that because she had some low-level literacy students in the group that she might try and consider some ways of setting up the site that might assist these students. So between us we came up with some ideas, for instance she uploaded icons, little pictures to put next to the links on the side, which I’d never seen done before. One of her students happened to be a moderator of her own website and was really quite experienced at doing this type of thing, so she has taken a real leadership role in this and has gone into the help section, read the help section from top to bottom, learned things about wikis that even I hadn’t had time to look at, and began to feedback all this information to me and the other tutor. Also we gave her permission to set up various things on the wiki herself, so for instance she taught another fairly computer-literate student how to download some games and they uploaded them onto the site. So they have a little play section that the students that don’t have such high computer level skills can learn some really good mouse skills by clicking and dragging and playing these games. They also got right into putting little icons and animated things to brighten up the site. She also took the help section and rewrote a lot of it very simply, using bigger text for the lower-level literacy students. We also buddied this particular person with one of the low-level literacy students who found it a bit daunting to contribute to the wiki and she is, at this point, working with her in the class situation, in a face-to-face situation in the class, helping her to come to terms with the wiki and to feel that she can put something on there, and I feel we are just about on the cusp of this person being able to upload something onto the discussion area of the wiki. So we’re all holding our breath for that. When it does happen it’s going to be an amazing breakthrough because this person was absolutely terrified at the beginning. So in a couple of months she’s come a long way.
The other low-level literacy student has started to contribute and put things up on the discussion area and I also made sure that the tutor and this other student replied straightaway, and I also pop in from time to time and put in some encouraging replies to this student and the more you reply to him the more he starts to contribute. So that seems to be working really well too.
Another thing that they’ve uploaded is a Google calendar, and the students absolutely love this. They can get onto the calendar and find out things like assessment due dates, what’s coming up on the program for their learning, any field expeditions etc, where they have to go at what times etc, all that kind of thing. They can also put things up themselves, and so we get students’ birthdays and all sorts of things happening on there as well and they really enjoy using that.
Another thing the tutor has done is she has uploaded assessment tasks and in a face-to-face session together we showed the students how to download them and they’ve all managed to do that at home now, except for the one student who has been buddied.
Blogging as a extension of face-to-face learning
Blogs are a little bit different because I believe there are more issues about privacy and things that need to be considered. So as far as blogs are concerned I have always maintained that the students can choose whether they wish to do their journaling online or in a written form. Those who have chosen to do it online have found it beneficial because when they’re sitting at their computer they remember to go into their blogs and it’s just more typing. So they can be doing a project, finish that bit for the night and think that was an absolute drag, I hated that, I really loathed that, I’m going to put that in my blog. So they can just quickly whip into their blog and throw in all their feelings into the blog. I’ve had feedback from some of them that this has been quite cathartic, they’ve really got it all off their chest and found it a great way of getting their feelings out.
They’ve also found that by journaling their progress through the course has been a great way of showing them how far they’ve come. I always encourage them to look back over their previous blogs and go right back to the beginning of the year to where they started and just reread the blogs and see how far they’ve come. They really enjoy this, they say that this is a really beneficial thing for them because when they get a bit down – as they do sometimes, all students get a bit down – they can look back on their blogs and say crikey, look at me back at the beginning of the year, I knew absolutely nothing about this and now look at me. So I think that has been a really good process.
Only the students who choose to do their blogging online join in with. We also had a discussion about whether they wanted other students to be able to read their blogs. I thought this was an interesting discussion and it came from themselves actually, not me. Some of them said that they thought it would be beneficial if other students could read their blogs and then they would see that maybe they weren’t the only ones who were finding things difficult or whatever and they could encourage each other. So some of them have done this. I said it was okay as long as they chose it themselves and gave the person their address, that it didn’t come through me, that I wasn’t prepared to give anybody anyone else’s blogging address but if they wished to do that then it was up to them, and that’s been quite good too, there have been some good things come out of that.
However, the flipside of that is that some of the students were very, very anxious about putting things like blogs online and we had to do quite a bit of talking about the rules of blogging and how you research people, if you want to say something about somebody that isn’t entirely complimentary that you never use the person’s name, for instance – things like that. Some people just felt that was all too hard and just wanted to keep doing their journaling in the written form and as far as I’m concerned that’s quite okay.
My ideas for using the student journals is that I give them an idea and I say that I find that putting an entry into my blog once a week is beneficial for me, so I suggest that they do that, but writing is not always everybody’s cup of tea. Some people find writing very easy and very cathartic and they can go on for a long time, whereas others find writing, and especially about themselves, very difficult. So some of them choose to do it once a week, some once a fortnight, but my only stipulation was that they had to at least do one blog a month – some of them do much more than that. Some of them have even decided that they’ll go halfway – they don’t want to journal online but they still want the sense of being able to sit at their computer and type their journals and send it somewhere, so they email their extracts to me. So as a halfway point that’s quite effective as well, and I can then reply to them and give them comments on their journaling. The same with the blogs actually – I have the addresses of all the students’ blogs and so I can go in and give comments on their blogs and give them helpful advice when I feel that they might need it.
Evaluating the new practice
For evaluation purposes we always use a written survey which we’ve developed and the students are asked to fill out the written survey. The lower-level literacy students are assisted by another student to fill it out. That is one level. Another level is they have discussions in class on it and notes are taken and at some point we are thinking that, with their permission, we might be able to record it and have recorded audio information available on their verbal feedback. We also have feedback from the tutors on how they find using this type of technology with their students and whether in fact they do feel it’s beneficial, what are the drawbacks, are there any, are there any really good things that are happening. We use student feedback in a written form such as we take not of things that they say during the session. For instance, one student during the session said ‘I thought I would hate using the internet because I hate using it at home, but this is fun’. Those types of comments we write down and keep them in a special place and at the end of each project we gather together all the evidence and use it this way.