Wikis in eLearning 2.0

The latest issue of the journal Interactive Learning Environments is a special issue entitled: Towards eLearning 2.0 University, and is guest edited by Adriana Berlanga, Francisco Garcia Penalvo and Peter Sloep. When I first saw this proposal I was immediately enthusiastic and it didn't take long for Joe Psotka (my co-editor) and I, to commission it. Now the three have brought the issue to fruition, and an excellent one it is, exactly as I anticipated. The seven papers and editorial focus on how Web 2.0 social media can, and are being used to enhance, extend and enrich learning in higher education. It's dedicated to the question of how universities are integrating social media into academic practice, with the aim to foster eLearning 2.0 - where the student is placed at the centre of a more social, personal and flexible learning process. I'm impressed by the scope and scale of the projects in this issue.

The first paper, by Lim et al, focuses on new digital literacies and asks whether social practices are lagging behind expectations. There follows an erudite explanation of socio-techno-spatial relationships, where learners shift their dependence away from their tutors to their peers, and where teachers in turn have to learn new pedagogical practices to keep up with the changes taking place.

Another stand out paper in the issue is an exploration by Karasavvides of the use of wikis in higher education, and the attendant barriers and difficulties that need to be overcome for full acceptance and embedding into the learning process. The author identifies seven types of problems from a recent wiki study, including time management, student resistance, plagiarism and lack of collaboration.

Similar findings are presented by Huang and Nakazawa in their paper entitled: An empirical analysis on how learners interact in wiki in a graduate level online course. The study investigated how learners initiate and manage learning activities in wiki environments, and predictably, discovered a significant qualitative difference between learner-learner and learner-tutor interactions. Students clearly interacted more with their peers, leading to speculation on what role tutors should adopt in such learning environments. Students also encountered the problem of losing momentum because they could perceive no actual ending point to their assignment. The authors call for further research to be conducted into that quality of interaction within wiki type learning environments.

More from this issue tomorrow.


Wikis in eLearning 2.0 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.