Summary: Some links and a few comments about the use of Wikis in higher education. Heather James surfaces the contrast of instructivist vs constructivist and points to the wiki-based learning environment as a promising host for constructivist processing by teacher and class.

[For a good, readable background on wiki's try InfoToday's April Article starting about here.]

To start off on classroom uses try Heather James' first entry: My Brilliant failure: Wikis in Classrooms [via Julian Elve at Synesthesia]

Now that you're sort of oriented and somewhat confused, read Heather James' second entry: Aiming for Communal Constructivism in a Wiki Environment in which she clarifies and explains more.

Here's a link to Matt Barton's Paper Embrace the Wiki Way

Mark Phillipson's Summary of Wiki Pros and Cons of using a wiki in Teaching Course: The Romantic Audience at Bowdoin College.

M C Morgan is also using wiki's in higher education. Here's an extract from his presentation: VirtuesOfWiki

Online courses are more and more being moved into IMS [?Instructional Management System?]: WebCT?, et al. But WebCT? et al do not support creating and recreating text so much as they re-create the traditional classroom interactions and roles. Write a paper, post a paper, teacher grades a paper. Read a chapter, take a test on a chapter, get a grade on the chapter. Teacher points to stuff to look at, to read, to consider. Students talk to on another in small groups, then post another paper .

Wiki provides no IMS : too free form. That might make it less (or more?) satisfactory for DE [?Department of Education?], but it makes it good for f2f [?face to face?]. The structure of the wiki grows from within, shaped by people working with content. Instructors structure their instruction to suit: they set up the task, oversee, guide, prompt, promote, reward.

• (When Collaboration Doesn[base ']t Work - (PDF) Students did not participate in wikis when they viewed their homework as having only one correct answer (indeed, more open-ended, ill-structured problems are better at encouraging group learning, see for example(Problem-Based Learning), or if the class was highly competitive with grading on a curve (it is to their advantage for other students to do worse than them), or they did not want to admit any need for help from the teacher or others (something that has been termed learned helplessness). I think this is a nice example of how we can learn a great deal by hearing about how a technology was unsuccessfully used with students, not just the positives. How we use a technology affects learning, not the technology itself. The classroom culture and context have to support its effective use. But that's not to say though that technology is neutral with respect to what uses it affords more easily than others (here are related references on that topic: 1, 2).

• A Catalog of CoWeb Uses - (PDF) A list of some of the successful contexts and activities that encouraged productive use of wikis by students.

• Beyond adoption to invention: Teacher-created collaborative activities in higher education - (PDF) This Journal of the Learning Sciences article highlights some of the inventive uses teachers and students developed while using the wikis.

• Where did all the people go? A collaborative Web space with social navigation information - an essay by Andreas Dieberger on extending a wiki to show information about the interaction history - telling the users about the amount of traffic and recent modifications to wiki pages. People typically describe the social navigation CoWeb [wiki] as being more "alive".

• See also the ContentManagementSystem page for other examples of people adapting wikis for educational purposes, including the TECFA SEED project which expands upon the above catalog of Coweb uses to newer generations of online collaborative tools beyond just wikis.