Language Teacher Education
4. The wiki project: collecting professional knowledge
shortcomings such as technical problems (cf. Belz 2002), tensions and miscom- munication between participants (cf. Belz 2002; O’Dowd/Ritter 2006; Ware 2005), as well as the fact that there are still many poorly educated teachers (cf. Müller- Hartmann 2006; O’Dowd/Ritter 2006). It has been widely acknowledged that the role of teachers in internet-mediated teaching is crucial (cf. Belz 2003; O’Dowd 2007) and therefore language teachers need to learn how to incorporate social media and CMC tools into the classroom by experiential learning supported by model teaching (cf. Müller-Hartmann 2006).
Besides exploring and reflecting on the potential of social media for collabora- tive language learning processes, and with an aim to increase students’ digital lit- eracies, this joint project carried out a learning-by-doing and an experience-based approach to utilizing social media for learning purposes in the university class- room. The goal was to engage students in meaningful collaborative work and com- munication using social media, and offer tasks that allow students to plan, design and create their own social media products. The remaining part of this article will demonstrate how this pedagogic rationale was put into practice in three different projects during the online collaboration between Karlsruhe and Muenster students.
opinion that information is altered too easily as to be considered reliable. How- ever, this openness to collaboration can also lead to the correction of erroneous information (cf. Kessler 2009). Therefore the system of a wiki can only work posi- tively with users who are serious about working collaboratively and who follow the group conventions and practices (cf. Godwin-Jones 2003). Only by using and authoring wikis, learners are able to understand the potential of this technology.
There are several wiki providers offering different features and structures, a fact which needs to be considered when creating wikis in educational contexts. De- pending on the learner group, Schwartz et al. (2004) recommend defining a set of criteria for evaluating these options and suggest considering cost, complexity, control possibilities, clarity and desired features before choosing a provider.
In this particular wiki project, Wikispaces was used, a provider offering educa- tional wikis that are free of charge. After the registration process, teachers in their role of organizers can set up a new wiki with little effort and use the dashboard surface to micro-manage all procedures: inviting students as members to the wiki space, using the newsfeed of the dashboard to make announcements, and creating individual projects within the wiki. Other options include an events-section with a calendar for time management and setting deadlines, and also an assessment function in which teachers can retrace the activities of the students while they are working on a predetermined project. Wikispaces offers a clear structure for a classroom wiki, with easily recognizable icons representing certain functions and activities. Yet it might still take a while, both for teachers and students new to this system, to fully understand the layout and the functions of this wiki, and most importantly, to learn how to collaborate in an assigned project and negotiate and edit the emerging wiki entries.
For the wiki collaboration, a project was created in which students were to explore and describe in detail how exactly a certain online medium, website or media tool could contribute to a learner’s development of a particular language skill (e.g. listening or writing). To this end, the students had to research potentially suitable tools and evaluate their potential for the chosen targeted skill, and then transform and synthesize the information they gathered into a wiki entry. In smaller groups of up to four members, students worked together in sub-pages, with each sub-page providing the environment for collaboration in this project: a surface for viewing the existing text, an editing function to alter the text (e.g. one student start- ing with the presentation of a website for listening and evaluating benefits, with-at a later point in time-another student adding their opinion to the previously written text), a revision section to return to previous savings, and a discussion thread (e.g.
in order to make suggestions for changes or further additions). The objective was
to create a well-reflected and researched collaborative wiki entry representing the shared efforts and negotiations of the whole group. This required that students ac- tually built on and supplemented each other’s text additions by contributing their own information and opinions to those which fellow group members had already produced. In line with a wiki’s common function as a resource and information me- dium, the idea was also to develop valuable teaching knowledge available for sharing with other teachers, and to use a wiki as a give-and-take support network to search for, and present to others, best-practice examples and professional knowledge.
After two weeks of independent work outside the university classroom, with the instructors withdrawing and helping out solely when technical problems oc- curred (e.g. registration process, loss of membership data), the students presented their wiki entries in class and reflected on the shared results and collaboration processes. In general, students maintained that they enjoyed using the wiki as a new social medium and experienced the sharing of ideas with other students as enriching. The types of wiki entries that were actually developed, however, differed to quite some extent. One group’s result clearly represented a shared product in which the members co-constructed the text by adding and changing information in the editing process and by negotiating changes in the discussion feed. Said group reported that this was an elaborate and time-consuming process, as the information posted by one member had to be checked by other members, too, so that they had the basis to be able to form an objective opinion and arrive at an educated judgment on the suitability of a medium to foster a certain language skill. The same students also said, and this was confirmed by the other groups, that they were unsure as to who should start by posting an idea, as the first person to write might become the subject of immediate criticism or judgment. During the process, however, it turned out that –if the shared mission’s goal was to work towards a fruitful entry– constructive criticism was felt to be helpful and it was insightful and rewarding to learn from other students’ expertise. This indicates that collaborating on a wiki requires a community of trust and respect as a basis for disclosing to others one’s own ideas, and that it also takes time –especially in collaborations where students do not know each other in advance, or work from remote places– to develop mutual trust.
Interestingly, the other groups bypassed the construction of a shared wiki entry with collaborative editing and revision. Rather, individual group members would begin with posting an idea on how a certain online medium could be used for competence development, and then other members would post their ideas on a different medium without engaging with what group members had previously posted. This shows that there is not necessarily an in-depth processing of the
information others contribute, and that the final outcome could also result in an unconnected list of various teaching ideas. Surprisingly, two groups did not use the text surface of their sub-page at all, but posted their ideas right into the dis- cussion feed –again in an unconnected way without referring to or commenting on previous discussion points. In their reflections, the students who produced these types of outcome stressed that still they had produced a list of teaching advice that might potentially be useful, but remarked that this list was not neces- sarily reliable because the knowledge it represented was not double-checked or critically edited. The same students also recognized, especially in comparison to the first group described, that they had not fully exploited the potential that a wiki holds in store and that they had engaged with the collaboration task rather superficially. To improve their work, some students suggested that an even more careful introduction to the purposes and processes of the wiki might be necessary and that face-to-face classroom sessions could also have been used for interven- tions and reflections to show other paths of use of a wiki –rather than making the wiki collaboration an independent project with little or no guidance during the process. Other students added that precisely because they had not collaborated in an ideal way they were now more aware of what is actually important when creating a shared outcome on a wiki.