The wiki way of learning

CHICAGO — 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 the new pathbreaking collection “The Wiki Way of Learning: Creating Learning Experiences Using Collaborative Web Pages,” published by ALA Editions, 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, authors Michele Notari, Rebecca Reynolds, Samuel Kai Wah Chu, and Beat Döbeli Honegger give

• a theoretical overview of the concept of web-based collaboration and the social implications of the participative web, in a foreword 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; and
• coverage of two different scaffolding models for learning scenarios which have been implemented and tested in the US, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and China.

Notari is professor for educational technologies at the University of Teacher Education in Bern, Switzerland. He has published articles in key journals in the area of technology-enhanced learning, along with a book and several book chapters related to collaborative learning using participative technologies. He is editor of a special edition of the Journal of Educational Research and Evaluation and is a board member of Wikisym (the international symposium on open collaboration), the international Conference on Mobile Learning, and the International Mobile Learning Festival. Reynolds is an assistant professor of library and information science at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Her work has been published in many different conference proceedings and journals in the learning sciences and information sciences, and she has written a book coauthored with Chu and Notari on inquiry-based learning. Chu is the head of division of information and technology studies and an associate professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong. He has published over 170 articles and books, and is the associate editor (Asia) for the Online Information Review: The International Journal of Digital Information Research and Use. Honegger is professor at the Institute for Media and Schools at the Schwyz University of Teacher Education in Switzerland. His research interests cover all aspects of digital media in education including teaching and learning in the transition toward a digital society, strategic and operative information technology management in schools and universities, collaborative writing, digital textbooks, and the didactics of computer science.

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