The Wiki Way of Learning

Given the limited budgets of schools, educators, and school librarians, free and open source tools for learning are more important than ever. Essentially, wikis are easily accessible webpages for creating, browsing, and searching through information, making them ideal vehicles for teaching and collaboration. In this pathbreaking collection, theoreticians and practitioners from a range of international settings explore how wikis are being used to create learning experiences in a variety of educational environments, from grade schools through universities. Offering numerous hands-on examples of using collaborative webpages with learners, this book gives teachers, educators, and instructor librarians a theoretical overview of the concept of web-based collaboration and the social implications of the participative web written by Mark Guzdial, a pioneer in using wikis in education; an understanding of how wiki-engines function as a flexible tool for collaboratively creating, linking, revising and regrouping hypertext content; pragmatic guidelines for the educational use and application of wikis, including applications as e-learning management systems, informational resource libraries, online tutorials, maker community project creation, and digital asset file management; strategies for setting up a learning unit the Wiki Way and choosing the most appropriate and suitable wiki-engine in a particular education setting; coverage of two different scaffolding models for learning scenarios which have been implemented and tested in the US, Germany, Hong Kong, and China. Enabling readers to see how wikis content and content creation processes can be harnessed for instructional design, this collection represents an important advance in improving education through collaborative technologies.