Connection to Learning and Personal Reflection:

After careful consideration, I think that the benefit to learning is more for the teacher than for the student. I could see this being used in a classroom as a teaching tool, but I think that personally I would prefer to use a wiki for professional development.

I think that wikis could be used in a classroom as an on-going project that could span a long period of time, such as a semester or term. Student could be required to add their own research, thoughts, or questions to the class wiki and have it as a way to change up the learning process. Instead of being passive about the learning, they could be active and actually initiate or control the process. I could see this working in a few subjects.

To me the benefit of wikis can be found in the opportunity for professional development and professional collaboration. This is my fifth online course from the University of Alberta and I find that by far, the most beneficial aspect for me is the discussion portion of every course.
When I started my graduate studies, I had only been a TL for one whole school year; before that I had only been a classroom teacher for two years. I was still thinking like an undergraduate in many ways and I was very unsure of myself and what I was doing in the library. I found that my first couple of courses enabled me to ask questions of other teachers and TLs from around the province and country and to compare my practices to other librarians. I found out that I was not way off the mark and most of what I was doing was correct. The confidence that gave me was and is indescribable! I compare the online discussion in our WebCT to wikis. The ability to read, respond and question other professionals in the same area is extremely useful to me. Even though I don’t feel that I need to respond to every post or topic, I do read them all and I learn something new just about every day- I found that responding to questions or topics on the wiki was very similar to the discussion process in the course.

Now that I have a few years under my belt, I feel that I have some useful things to say; things I have learned from my own experiences and things that I have read or discussed in my courses. It is an awesome thing! I know that some of the wikis (and blogs) that I have come across during my research for this particular class will be permanently in my bookmark tool (actually on my del.icio.us account now as well). The potential for collaboration cannot be understated and to people (like myself) who don’t get to do a whole lot of one-on-one collaboration with fellow teacher librarians, I think that this provides the perfect vehicle for just that. I will be spreading the word!

I want to share some interesting information I found on the Boston College website. It addresses the advantages of using wikis in the classroom. I think that one could also apply these benefits to teachers as well. The list of benefits for collaboration learning is:

"Learning from others. Collaborative authoring allows students to learn from one another – both in terms of viewing each other’s content but also by seeing the quality of other students’ work. In a traditional classroom, a student writes a paper, the teacher grades it, and then returns it to the student. Other students rarely have the opportunity to see and therefore learn from the information in that paper. Seeing other students’ work on a continuous basis can cause a student to evaluate his or her own work and see how it compares in quality. The comparison may cause the student to raise his or her work to a higher level.

Developing a higher level of critical thinking. Students can develop critical thinking skills by critiquing other students’ information and learning how to defend their views when critiqued by other students.

Deepening investigative skills. Working collaboratively on one document can encourage a student to do more investigative work. When information is critiqued as incorrect or underdeveloped, the author is encouraged to do additional research to respond to the critiques.

Developing skills for negotiating conflict and facilitating effective teamwork. Professors at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi found that working on a wiki helps co-authors negotiate conflict. In Wiki As a Collaborative Writing Tool, they write that “conflict … is an inherent part of the collaborative process…Wikis provide a means to negotiate conflict and to build upon the positive aspects of conflict. In writing and working collaboratively with wikis, users must create and agree on the structures, forms, and methods that are necessary to accomplish their collaborative task….[The] required negotiation of space can lead to a better understanding of the social processes that underlie any collaborative activity. In these ways, wikis not only build constructive communities of writers, but also accommodate differences among members of these communities, which in turn can allow all voices to contribute to the conversation.”

Building a class community. "

© Boston College 2007

The site has many more benefits, but this entry would be a little long if I included them all! I think that as a profession that likes to encourage life-long learning, wikis could be one of the greatest tools we have to achieve that goal. Everything on this site is directed at students, but it could be applied to teachers or just about any profession.

Conclusion:

I think that wikis have become my favourite Web 2.0 tool- in case you couldn’t tell. It is not really for the teaching aspects, but for my own personal learning and professional growth. I find that speaking with people who are in similar situations and have been there before is one of the best ways for me to learn and grow as both a classroom teacher and a teacher librarian. Long live the Wiki!!

That is what I think about wikis- please excuse the gushing!
Katie