Student Perceptions of the Use and Value of Wiki Technology for the Creation and Dissemination of an Orthopedic Physical Therapy Assignment

Abstract

Background and Purpose. Although the impact of technology on learning and social interactions remains unclear, the reality is that most current college students, including graduates students, have grown up in a world immersed with technology. Today's increasingly technological world expects professionals to use technology as part of their professional activities. Engaging adult learners in higher education through assignments and activities that require use and application of technology should be part of today's educational reality.Participants. Thirty-four students, in their second year of a Doctor of Physical Therapy degree program, enrolled in a required orthopedic physical therapy course served as a sample of convenience for this descriptive study. The sample consisted of 23 female and 13 male students, mean age of 26, and ages ranged from 23 to 35 years.Case Description. This descriptive study used a pretest and posttest survey to investigate student perceptions of the value of, and their confidence in, setting up and disseminating a wiki-based webpage (a wikipage) as a course requirement. The webpage was meant for investigating a clinical topic, analyzing and synthesizing the findings, and making recommendations for the physical therapy management of patients with that clinical condition. Students were instructed that the completed pages would serve as an interactive resource available for both classmates and the public to view. The wikipage was faculty-controlled, with an imposed organizational structure for unified formatting across pages.Outcomes. Prior to the starting the assignment, 64.7% of students were unfamiliar with using wiki technology; 29.5% of students were concerned that it would be difficult to learn. After completion of the assignment, 85.3% of respondents indicated that wiki technology was easy to use and that they would continue to contribute to their wiki page. Additionally, 82.3% indicated that they would seek out and continue to use wiki technology in the future.All students (100%) agreed that learning how to use wiki technology was a useful exercise and indicated that the assignment has lasting value as the information generated could be shared with a global audience and accessed easily. Students reported taking 10-40 hours (with a median of 19 hours) to complete the assignment. This median value was approximately twice as much as was anticipated prior to the beginning of the assignment, according to the pre-assignment survey data.Discussion and Conclusion. Students valued this type of assignment. The students' satisfaction with the global readership opportunity for the final product and their interest in engaging with the technology in the future also were success indicators for this project. This project provided a foundational online resource that can be used by future student groups to engage in the collaboration that is so often associated with these types of web-pages. The global nature of the web also presents interesting opportunities for global collaboration with students from physical therapy schools across the country and the world.Key Words: Wikipage, Orthopedics, Technology, Morphopedics.INTRODUCTIONThe books of Tapscott1 and Prensky2'3 have popularized the terms Net Generation and Digital Natives, applying these labels to those born around or after the time that the personal computer was first introduced to the mass marketplace (in the early 1980s). These authors have suggested that growing up with personal computing as a normal part of daily life has resulted in a generation (those born after 1984) that not only learns differently but prefers different social interaction models from prior generations. To date, these assumptions have not undergone sufficient empirical investigation to draw any definitive conclusions, thus cautioning against sweeping generalizations about the learning preferences of an entire generation.46Although the impact of ever-increasing technology on learning preferences is not well understood, educators must recognize that today's students have grown up in a different world than they did. …