Wiki

A Wiki is a website that allows a collaborative effort and publishes the result. With a Wiki students may work internally or externally of their classroom on a project by using the same Wiki to edit, type and save information. There is usually a single owner of this Wiki who may accept edits posted by those whom participate in the process. Wikipedia is the largest example of a Wiki website that has been built by many people who post their information to this site using this edit and save process. Anybody with access to the internet may add information to Wikipedia.

There are various free sites available where anyone may start a Wiki without any prior web development experience being necessary. Wiki's may be set-up for viewing and access to a specific group or open to anyone. One of the most successful uses of a Wiki within education involved the collaborative effort of students to create their own text book complete with text, web links, photos, YouTube video and audio. This project had been coordinated by a teacher at the Korean International School titled "A Broken World: A Modern World History Wiki-Text Book" (Burell, 2007).


Burell, 2007)
 
Providing all students will have adequate access to facilities or resources required to participate in building a project within a Wiki then this presents an exceptional opportunity to engage the learners in self-guiding their own learning. Since the project is facilitated totally within an online communications environment, this breaks down many barriers that affect students, particularly isolated within regional areas or in areas where students may wish to take their project to others around the globe. Since a wiki can communicate text, you-tube video and audio content, this would be an excellent tool for any regionally isolated school and community to combine to promote their region, culture and community to the world and the best part is, it's can be achieved for free.

I would use a Wiki to establish a community based project in a similar way that the Aboriginals from the Aurukun community used multimedia to tell their story as shown within the ABC's Message Stick stories. These stories may be viewed at: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/messagestick/stories/s2496801.htm and http://www.abc.net.au/tv/messagestick/stories/s2502934.htm .

A Wiki project that involves linking individuals to authentic problems faced within their community may provide other benefits; such as, increasing learner participation rates, increased motivation and satisfaction as a direct result of the meaningful topic negotiated with each learner (Kaplan & Vadiveloo, 2008).

This is supported by Kearsley and Shneiderman's (1999) "Engagement Theory" suggesting learners who are encouraged to pursue a project, in collaboration with a broader authentic community issue, establish a sense of belonging increasing individual motivation and satisfaction. When allowed to conduct their own project, these feelings, provide the learner with a sense of control over their direction and learning. In the end, individuals will understand the value of their contribution while participating throughout the learning process.

Another major benefit of applying the aforementioned Wiki project includes the ability to adjust individual projects to cater for individual differences. These differences may be physical disability, a gift or talented student, gender, linguistic diversity or culture. In following the project scenario already discussed above, there remains scope to adjust the pedagogical approach to include indigenous perspectives framework "My Land My Tracks : A framework for the holistic approach to indigenous studies" (Grant, 1998).


References

Burell, C. (2007). A broken world: A modern world history wiki-text book [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmkqcp11pHM&feature=player_embedded

Grant, E. (1998). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies handbook: My land my tracks. Retrieved from http://education.qld.gov.au/schools/indigenous/docs/uncle-ernies-framework.pdf

Kearsley, G. & Shneiderman, B. (1999). Engagement theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning. Retrieved from http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm

Kaplan, A. & Vadiveloo, D. S. (2008). ABC Message Stick: Voices from the cape – part 1 [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/tv/messagestick/stories/s2496801.htm

Kaplan, A. & Vadiveloo, D. S. (2008). ABC Message Stick: Voices from the cape – part 2 [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/tv/messagestick/stories/s2502934.htm