Wiki-ing: “the learning iceberg”

In my previous post, I drew an analogy between the process of wiki-ing and the “structure” of the iceberg, casting light on the extreme importance of what lies “beneath the surface”, that is the cooperation of multiple authors and their continuous information exchange as the basis for knowledge contruction.

The fact that the wiki administrator, Daniel Schneider, sent a message to Sarah in order to give us a few pieces of advice that can help us to improve our wiki contributions so as to render them as much professional as possible highlights the crucial role played by collaboration in the success of this “collective work” (or rather of any collective project). As a matter of fact, Sarah took his suggestions as a starting point for asking us to fix up our wiki contributions. Moreover, we were asked to provide feedback on our peers’ contributions, giving our impressions (both positive and negative) and, consequently, some suggestions for improvement.

In my opinion, the fact that Schneider’s message triggered a sort of “chain reaction” is quite meaningful for now the interaction is no longer bi-directional, but tri-directional: we collaborate “directly” with Sarah when we discuss issues and problems in class – but also online for the rest of the week! – and “indirectly” with the wiki administrator, who “oversees” our work. I think that this “intersection of different experiences”, that is the fact that students / learners collaborate with people who are experienced in this kind of activities, is “the key to active online learning” (Salmon, 2002).

Thanks to all the hints given by Daniel Schneider and Sarah, we are increasingly aware of what we have done so far and of what we are learning. Furthermore, as I wrote in the post concerning my feedback on my peers’ contributions, the only way of achieving better results day by day is to identify problems and work on them. This is precisely what we have done during the week. In particular, we have learned to:

-be clear and concise;

-summarize our ideas, divide the text into short paragraph and use bold to facilitate the reading;

-always cite sources;

For all the reflections made so far, I think that the “shell model” may be particularly suitable for describing the whole process of wiki-ing: all the contributions – my contribution, Alice’s contribution, Marco’s contribution, Annalisa’s contribution, etc. plus Sarah’s contribution, Schneider’s contribution, etc. – form all the layers of the model, thus creating a “multi-level stratification” made up of different, but complementary ideas, thoughts, pieces of information, reflections, observations through which we can really “build” texts together and “construct” knowledge.

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Towards Knowledge Construction: my wiki experience

My first impressions of wiki-ing are extremely positive for two main reasons: firstly, the fact that we can contribute to a public wiki (edutech) gives us the possibility to have a clearer idea of what this activity is about; secondly, we are given the great opportunity to “tell the world” what we’ve learned so far during the English course.

Marco, Alice and I are contributing to the page “E-tivity” together. We chose to edit this page simply because e-tivities are precisely what the overall course structure is made up of. As we deal with this kind of computer-mediated educational activities every week, explaining how we work to an audience much larger than our course group seemed quite interesting to the three of us.

I can sum my experience up by mentioning three of the five steps identified by Gilly Salmon to explain the nature of distant education (see The 5 stage model):

-online socialization

-information exchange

-knowledge construction

We may liken the whole process to an iceberg: knowledge construction – the fact that we “build” texts together – is the iceberg tip, i.e. the “visible part”, whereas online socialization and information exchange “lie beneath the surface”. This means that the process of sharing and exchanging information online is the basis for the construction of knowledge: the virtual encyclopaedia written by multiple authors is what one can see on the page, but this “visible part” is the result of a long, delicate process of collaboration that is, in a certain sense, “concealed”.

I think that it is difficult for someone who doesn’t know how a wiki works to understand that what paved the way towards the construction of the texts he/she sees is the online collaboration among a large group of people working together. If a casual surfer happens to visit edutechwiki, without knowing what this public wiki is about, he/she will see just a webpage, like many others, dealing with a certain topic, but he/she won’t probably understand the process that lies behind it.

Nevertheless, it is precisely this “hidden part” what, in my opinion, really counts: while at school we were supposed to write texts by ourselves and what was marked was the single essay, the single account, the single composition, written by the single author, through wiki-ing we learn to collaborate, to leave room for other people’s contributions: we are one of the authors, rather than the author.

Thanks to wiki-ing we can enhance our critical thinking skills for our “mission” doesn’t consist exclusively in writing a text on our own, but in reading what another person has written before us on the same topic, taking notes on what we can modify or add to improve the quality of the text and then writing our final contribution. That’s why wiki-ing is “a work in progress that continues to evolve with time”.

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