Week 3 - Engagement Activity 3: Wiki reflection

Engagement Activity 3: Creating a wiki -  reflection

My wiki

1. In your blog, create a new posting reflecting on the learning potential of a wiki in your context.  You are considering the technical affordances of the wiki (the things it can do), and how these can be used by you and your students to support, facilitate and transform learning.  Again, be sure to write analytically rather than being just descriptive. A SWOT analysis or PMI is a suitable scaffold for your analysis.

Wiki has huge potential to be used for sharing work or knowledge, the problem for me is that wiki is a bit hard to maintain once everyone can have their say. On the plus side, I can create a project for a single topic I am doing, and assign students to a team to respond to it. Maybe even do a competition between groups, students can be encouraged to post up videos they can find related to that topic, and explain why they choose that particular video.

SWOT for wiki

• Strength

Able to create project

Able to sign groups to a project

Easy for users to participate

Able to check wiki history

• Weakness

Multiple users cannot save their input at the same time

Hard to manage user to follow the instruction

Hard to control input

Time consuming to maintain wiki content

• Opportunity

Make a global classroom

Collect knowledge from more people

Learn about students from their inputs

• Threat

Cyber bullying

Easy for users to mess up the format

Easy for users to delete content by mistake

Once struggle with wiki users will not return

Exposed to inappropriate materials

2. As should now be embedded in your practice, be sure to consider the legal, safe and ethical requirements in working in a wiki. How will you support the development of these habits in your students?

There will need to be a basic house rule about the wiki site; this should be covered by school rule. I might show couple of examples to students if they do not follow the rules, their permissions maybe removed or limited compare with students who does. Show students examples of good wiki, and encourage students to build the wiki towards those sample wiki pages.

The other safety issue could come from the links or videos embedded to wiki, which students have no control of. This takes the teacher to spend time to check and maintain the wiki site to make sure it is safe; to me this could be one of the worse weaknesses for wiki, time consuming and hard to control the content.

3. Be sure also to link to your experiences in the Moodle wiki in Weeks 1 and 2. You should already have a blog posting responding to the reflection questions for these activities.

From week1&2 wiki, I am start to release the strength of wiki compare with blog. Wiki can be a good place to find ALL information from more users, but blog is a more personal or a group of people place. Blog can be well organized, compare with wiki I found blog is much tidier.

4. Be sure also to consider in your reflection that it is not just you, but more importantly your students, who will own and be working in the wiki space.

Wiki can be less attractive, because a lot of people are involved and the less attention you would likely to get from teachers if students were seeking for one on one advise.

Once students have a bad or unpleasant on wiki, it is going to be very hard to get them back to the system again. So the process of setting up instruction is important, and make sure it is easy for students to follow, and make sure the wiki site is well maintained with useful information.