Revolution in the Classroom

There are tens of thousands of wikis on the Internet, with Wikispaces being one of the major players in the 'wiki world'. Wikispaces provides a wiki-hosting service for its members, many of whom are from educational fields.

In an interview with Australian Flex e-News, Frey pointed out that wikis were an ideal tool for educators, as they were an evolution of the whiteboard. "Wikis create a place for people to write together, and ultimately a place for people to come together to get work done," Frey said. "They are an excellent tool for students and teachers to share ideas and gain feedback on their work.

"For example, it is a great place for students to post their work so that teachers and classmates can correct, improve, and discuss their ideas." Frey said that 'offline' communities have many similarities to the education communities that are being built around the use of wikis. "A wiki community, just like a real community, is what its members make it.

"Do they support each other and encourage each other to contribute? Are they tolerant of mistakes, and do they learn by correcting each other's mistakes, or do they try to impose barriers to entry by setting up structure and hierarchy needlessly?"

Making the wiki 'user friendly' is crucial, according to Frey."There's no point in having great technology that's hard to use. Teachers clearly are busy, and technology needs to enhance their classrooms, not impose steep learning curves. "A tool that's straightforward to use and fun makes it easy not only for the teacher to get started but for the students to get involved and become motivated."

Frey said there were three other important elements to the creation of wikis:

• The wiki needs to provide an easy method to get started (i.e. sign up, account creation).
• If the wiki is for private use, it needs to be secure.
• The teachers and trainers need to be able to monitor everything that happens in their wiki.

Frey said that the strength of Wikispaces was that no advanced computer programming knowledge was required to provide or edit content. "Wikispaces is our attempt to build a wiki that's easy to use and easy to adopt for all kinds of audiences. -œWe've kept the tool simple so that you can focus on building content, talking with other members, and growing your community."

Last month, the Australian training system's eLearning strategy, the Australian Flexible Learning Framework , invited Frey to discuss how wikis are used to share information among online education communities as part of its eLearning Networks Community Forum.

Wikis in Schools