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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