Pedagogical Manual

Given the diversity of activities that can be supported by a wiki, it is difficult to give definitive information in a report such as this. A wiki can be used as teaching tool or a complete teaching resource where all the pedagogical choices have been made. You can allow your students to lay out the organization of the wiki or create one yourself to serve as a guide for their activities. There are scenarios for academic use of wikis but they are not common and frequently are difficult to adapt to your material. If you believe in using a scenario to facilitate your first academic experience, on-line research might produce one that could be adapted to your needs. You might also consider a heuristic or systematic approach such as the following:

• Develop realistic objectives;
• Verify the availability of students for collaboration;
• Clarify the goals and roles of all participants;
• Establish a schedule, operating and ethical rules, and ensure student interest;
• Use the wiki to sign up students as either readers or editors.

Step Two : Presenting

Getting your students to use on-line collaborative tools is really not a guarantee of success in the classroom. Leading the team is essential, and without you, your participants' chances of creating something that they will learn from, are limited. As well, teamwork requires social skills, both cognitive and affective, that are not always inborn. These skills must be cultivated in your students actively in order to guide them toward success. Below is a systematic approach that can be adapted to your requirements:

Explain your Wiki

• Begin teamwork with fanfare in order to clearly inform students that participation in the wiki is starting;
• Ensure that your students understand the structure of your wiki and make changes as required.

Nurture Student Learning Through Teamwork

• Discuss what students must do to successfully work together to collect data;
• Teach, model and foster metacognitive skills for your students;
• Facilitate learning by adjusting wiki's structure to take collected data into account;
• Guide student strategies and methodologies for collaborative learning;
• Ask probing questions that help expand the horizons of students’ knowledge.

Survey Wiki Evolution

• Ensure respect for operating procedures and schedules;
• Motivate students through constructive feedback about their work;
• Intervene in case of trouble, be on the lookout for interpersonal conflicts that participants cannot resolve without outside assistance;
• Guide activities to ensure that learning goals are met but do not seek to control the final product;
• Give ongoing feedback to prevent misunderstandings and loss of time;
• Use wiki technical features (see the box below) to stay abreast of changes being made.

TECHNICAL FEATURES

To be an effective guide, you need to keep abreast of your students’ activities. The page Recent Changes will present in reverse chronological order all changes which can then be accessed through a link. Also, the New pages listings and Gallery of new files are useful to track recently added elements.

When there are several groups of participants who regularly modify their wiki, you can identify and track pages of interest. Identification is initiated by going to the page in question and clicking the "watch" tab which will add the page to your Watch List which can then be regularly consulted. The history tab on each page is another interesting feature. Here you can see each change in detail and remove those changes that you judge to be inappropriate.

Each of the tools above will not track a particular participant. This task can be achieved using the User contributions tool. In order to select a student, you must enter their user name in a field which is case sensitive. To simplify this task use the User list tool.

Note: Given that the wiki used in this study was in French, links are frequently to a French page. All titles, however, are those used in Mediawiki’s English version.

Step Three : Evaluating

Sommative Evaluation

As the wiki strives to increase student knowledge in a cooperative context, the final product presents problems for individual summative evaluation. Nonetheless, the wiki’s individual tracking ability allows the teacher to determine the individual contributions of participants in terms of cooperative skills or related technical abilities for purposes of summative evaluation. A summative group evaluation for the final product is also a possibility. We suggest that teachers who wish to evaluate individual student progress do so in an additional summative evaluation in the form of an analysis, an open-ended question or a role-play which avoids evaluating the individual’s contributions to the wiki.

Formative Evaluation

Throughout the production of the wiki, formative evaluation can be valuable. Opportunities to present related collaborative skills as well as procedural or factual knowledge abound in the environment of the wiki. Peer correction is an invaluable feature of the resource as well.

Various Wiki Features Useful for Evaluation

Certain wiki features facilitate the tasks of formative and summative evaluation, because they allow the teacher to track student activity. The box below outlines the features contained in the special pages index in the Mediawiki toolbox. Again, please be aware that as the wiki used in this study was in French, links are frequently to a French page. All titles, however, are those used in Mediawiki’s English version.