Wikis have become valuable tools in many student environments. Wallenberg Hall's research staff is working with a community from across campus to share best practices and the challenges of using wikis in teaching, learning, and research.
There have been two recent endeavors to make better sense of how wikis are used on Stanford's campus. The first is a model for analyzing wiki use in courses; the second an effort to build a working group of wiki users across campus.
Wiki Use in Courses
Helen L. Chen and Dan Gilbert (both of Wallenberg Hall), and Jeremy Sabol of Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), created a framework outlining how the use of a wiki can foster learning communities. The research team analyzed four case studies where wikis were intended to support face-to-face learning experiences and presented their findings at the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) conference earlier this year.
"We both had experience with wikis in our respective work," explains Chen, a researcher for SCIL who has specialized in e-portfolio learning. "I had been involved in Professor Larry Leifer's freshman seminar using wikis and Dan had taught a course on designing learning spaces in the SCIL Summer Institute. We wanted to make sense of how wikis were helpful in building learning communities and how instructors could best use them."
Gilbert, Sabol, and Chen identified 15 distinct steps that occur in the building of a community of learners. The original purpose was to develop a framework to analyze where wikis are helpful, and where they are not helpful in a class.
"We've found this framework to be a great starting point for conversations with faculty and staff who are in the process of exploring how wikis might be useful in achieving their course learning goals," says Chen. "The real promise for this research lies in the opportunities provided by wikis to create connections among learners within an environment that can capture evidence of learning and interaction that would otherwise be invisible."
For more information about using wikis at Stanford, see:
Working Group of Campus Wiki Users
In addition to our work studying the use of wikis in courses, the Wallenberg Hall team has helped build a campus community of wiki users. Working with Professor Michael Shanks of the Stanford Humanities Lab, Howard Rheingold from the Department of Communications, and Shinjeong Yeo and James Jacobs from SULAIR, Dan Gilbert has developed a loose community of users to identify and build on innovative practices that leverage the affordances of wikis. The group has had several meetings to discuss goals for adopting wikis, share strategies for introducing them to students, and compare the merits of specific wiki technologies.
In the future, this group might make recommendations to the broader community, establish some evaluation metrics and explore research projects and conference presentations. In the meantime, this group is sticking to its goal of being a place where wiki users from across campus can just check-in and bounce ideas off of one another.
If you are interested in joining this group, contact Dan Gilbert (dgilbert@stanford.edu) or Shinjoung Yeo (shyeo@stanford.edu).
