Modify existing digital content by using Wikis

A wiki is a website on which users collaboratively modify content and structure directly from the web browser. Wikis have become an increasingly popular form of technology use in classrooms, with different benefits: the use of wikis can support collaborative learning, promote active learning where students actively participate in educational activities, help you promote open dialogue and encourage community building. You can read more about how to use wikis in education here.

Wikipedia is the best known of these wiki projects and is a free and open encyclopedia where anyone can view and edit content. It is edited and written collaboratively by people from all over the world, and is a great resource to ask questions and use as a launching point for further research. Wikipedia articles include references and sources where you can verify the information being provided. Wikipedia has a very high-level standard for new articles and modifications, and as a consequence there is a very strict community of editors that enforce these rules. You can understand more about the dynamics of the Wikipedia community here and here.

WikiEducator is a community wiki-based project working collaboratively with the Free Culture Movement towards incremental development of Open Educational Resources, aiming at building capacity in the use of Mediawiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content, developing free content for use in different education settings. Wikis can be used also as course platforms, as in the GO-OPEN online course by the OER Universitas.

(estimated time to complete the task: 1 hour)

Play The Wikipedia Adventure, a game based tutorial designed to introduce a beginner to editing Wikipedia. The adventure tutorial takes around 1 hour to complete and can be paused and picked up again at any time. If you don’t wish to create an account on Wikipedia as an editor, instead spend some time exploring one of Wikimedia’s range of open knowledge projects.

Write a short reflective blog post on your own blog or the EduHack Wall on what you have learned about wikis and Wikipedia, as tools for teaching and learning, and on how you might use these tools in your teaching in the future.

• Have a look at this web page: Using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education developed within the Bookshelf project.
• Browse the Wiki Education’s Classroom Program, where university instructors assign students to write Wikipedia articles, empowering them to share knowledge with the world.
• Discover how to create OpenTextbooks through the WikiToLearn platform, and have a look at an example of an open book by David Wiley here.