Session 1 - Wikis

I went on Wednesday and saw a few sessions. The first theme was wikis/distance learning (not sure these are really obvious bedfellows, as you'll see).

The first session was from UNC-CH, not far from Raleigh actually. It focused on rural high school education via distance learning for advanced placement classes. Wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be. They didn't really talk about what the online facilitator interventions they did with the experiment group were, instead focusing on the effect it had. The overall effect of having online facilitators with additional training helping with the classes was that more students stuck with the course, but a lower percentage of the students passed the exam (as a result of more of the students sticking with it). This raised the question of if it was worth keeping more students to have them just fail.

The second session was about using wikis for teaching, from Deakin and Monash Universtiies in Australia. They did a staff development programme to teach staff how to use wikis for teaching (and they did it in just a wiki). It lasted 2 weeks and had about 15 people. The end result was that most of the staff didn't edit the wiki at all during the first week and the facilitators had to really cajole people to get any sort of participation. They used the same wiki tool that operates wikipedia, but installed on their servers. They didn't have the staff members access the wikis through Blackboard as we do, because they were worried about the effect of putting what they called a learner-controlled tool inside a teacher-controlled tool (i.e. Blackboard). To me, having wikis inside Blackboard allows a challenge of the tutor-controlled idea for those already comfortable with Blackboard. Also, I find the text editor in wikipedia awful compared to most other wikis. Finally they had a strange comment that they thought there was no participation as there was no reward like accreditation for doing the course, which just highlights the need for staff development to be viewed as its own reward and a necessary part of teaching.

The third session was from the Open University and was research from a PhD student on two classes using wikis with students. They were using the Moodle wiki tool, and basically it needed some rewriting to make the editor work better. Also, the students were using it for "authentic" tasks, but they were only sort of authentic. For instance, business students needed to make a management report for a project. However, they were all used to doing this as a highly-formatted Word document. They were apparently a bit miffed to have to do it as a wiki, leading to most of them cutting and pasting from Word rather than editing in the wiki. They also complained about wanting to do the task, not learn a new tool. Apparently the wiki tool wouldn't do certain things like add images that they wanted it to do. I thought when listening to the session that really they should've used something more like a Google document, if that is the format that these reports normally come into. However, they said they did it in Moodle as that is the requirement to try to standardize all courses. The main other message that came out of it was that students would benefit from a discussion space next to the wiki to discuss changes as they were not keen to modify each other's work, especially where there was some contention.