Utilizing Wiki-Systems in higher education classes: a chance for universal access?

Abstract

Wikis are a website technology for mass collaborative authoring. Today, wikis are increasingly used for educational purposes. Basically, the most important asset of wikis is free and easy access for end users: everybody can contribute, comment and edit-following the principles of Universal access. Consequently, wikis are ideally suited for collaborative learning and a number of studies reported a great success of wikis in terms of active participation, collaboration, and a rapidly growing content. However, the wikis success in education was often linked either to direct incentives or even pressure. This paper strongly argues that this contradicts the original intentions of wikis and, furthermore, weakens the psycho-pedagogical impact. A study is presented which focuses on investigating the success of wikis in higher education, when students are neither enforced to contribute nor directly rewarded similar to the principles of Wikipedia. Amazingly, the results show that, in total, none of the N = 287 students created new articles or edited existing ones during a whole semester. It is concluded that the use of Wiki-Systems in educational settings is much more complicated, and it needs more time to develop a kind of ''give-and-take'' generation.

Activities Based on Wiki Platform for Engineering Higher Education: Students' Point of View

“…Web 2.0 technologies that involve resources such as podcasts, photo and video sharing, instant messaging, among others, offer a high level of interactivity and communication between individuals as well as many possibilities for cooperation and collaboration (EBNER, KICKMEIER-RUST, HOLZINGER, 2008;SULISWORO, 2012;ABREU et al, 2012;JAMES, 2014;MAY et al, 2014;KIM, 2015). The wikis, one of the Web 2.0 technologies, can be used as a support tool for the teaching and learning process in order to improve 21st century skills such as critical thinking, reasoning and argumentation, information technology and communication, written communication, flexibility, adaptability, responsibility, collaboration, teamwork, cooperation, negotiation and leadership (GOMES, SOUSA, 2013;WANG, 2014;KIM, 2015).…”

Fomento de la Participación del Alumnado con Herramientas Libres de Trabajo Colaborativo Web 2.0

“…Creemos que usando tecnologías que les resulten cómodas y cercanas, y estableciendo un sistema de trabajo que siendo flexible les obligue a rendir cuentas, su implicación, satisfacción y rendimiento académico puede ser muy alto. También queremos destacar la importancia para la comunidad hispana de WikiHaskell de disponer de documentación libre de calidad en español gracias a este tipo de experiencias que proporcionan una adecuada recompensa a la participación en el wiki, algo absolutamente necesario (Ebner et al, 2008).…”

Enhancing Wikipedia Editing with WAI-ARIA

“…However the effectiveness of Wiki-based systems as learning tools is still controversial: various studies have confirmed the effectiveness of Wikis in education [2], [3], [18] while others have revealed important limits [7], [8].…”

“…In contrast, other studies pointed out that wiki ideas and principles did not work in some learning environments, due to students' lack of motivation, no "community feeling", and poor usability [7], [8]. Specifically Ebner et al [8] carried out two studies in higher education to investigate Wiki usage (student participation was voluntary, that is, users were not forced to utilize the system), highlighting "difficult to use" as one of the main causes of low active use of Wikis (inserting new content).…”

“…Specifically Ebner et al [8] carried out two studies in higher education to investigate Wiki usage (student participation was voluntary, that is, users were not forced to utilize the system), highlighting "difficult to use" as one of the main causes of low active use of Wikis (inserting new content).…”