The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: A Summary for Educators

Abstract

This white paper (adapted from a blog post at the EdTechResearcher website) provides a summary of the first scholarly publication from Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project: “The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equality in U.S. K-12 Schools.” The article was published in the February 2012 issue of Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association. The article can be found through this direct link or at this landing page. I’m very grateful to the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resources initiative for financial support, and to my co-authors Richard Murnane and John Willett.The article is written for a general audience of education researchers, and while I think it’s highly readable (so far as scholarly articles go), many folks may prefer a simpler version of the article. This white paper, therefore, is particularly targeted at classroom teachers and other school educators to share a bit about our findings and suggestions for using social media in classrooms. First, I explain what we did, and then I give some advice for wiki using educators.