Wiki Activities Research Articles

Wiki activities in blended learning for health professional students: Enhancing critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills

<span>Health professionals use critical thinking, a key problem solving skill, for clinical reasoning which is defined as the use of knowledge and reflective inquiry to diagnose a clinical problem. Teaching these skills in traditional settings with growing class sizes is challenging, and students increasingly expect learning that is flexible and interactive. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a blended method for teaching clinical reasoning using a wiki. Groups of undergraduate physiotherapy students presented a patient case to their peers in class and on a wiki. Evaluation included student surveys, focus groups, and online participation. Students were actively involved in the wiki (mean contribution of 21.0 web pages (IQR 7.5-34.5). Most students (74%) agreed the in-class sessions were valuable, compared to 48% for the wiki. From the educator's perspective, the wiki facilitated collaboration, ensuring demonstrated reasoning skills in class. Combining wiki with in-class activities enhances student collaboration and learning of critical thinking skills.</span>

The sustainability of corporate wikis

While existing theoretical frameworks describe collective technology adoption patterns, they provide little insight regarding the expected patterns of wiki activity within projects. Another impediment to the study of wiki sustainability is the absence of time-series analysis methods that are suitable for the unique patterns of wiki activity logs. The primary goals of this study are to: (i) develop a novel method for analyzing wiki edit activity logs, (ii) reveal the temporal patterns of corporate wiki edit activity, and (iii) study the factors impacting wikis' sustainability. A validation of our proposed method demonstrates that it is superior to the baseline algorithm in the face of noisy data. Our empirical study combines wiki system edit activity logs with a survey of users' perceptions, and explores 33277 distinct wiki applications within one global organization over the first 5 years of wiki operation. Our results reveal six different prototypical wiki activity patterns, and show that most corporate wikis become inactive after a relatively short period. Findings from the user survey show that users of sustainable wikis are more satisfied with the wiki system and its contents, and feel that the wiki provides them with a sense of community and productivity enhancements.

Wikis: a collective approach to language production

AbstractWikis represent a particular type of collaborative learning environment where collaboration can result in aggregated, collective products. This study makes the claim that such potential challenges language production practices in school where the individual learner's output is often the focus of attention. The argument is put forth by juxtaposing theory, literature review, and videotaped wiki activities. Wikis are examined in a sociocultural perspective, in particular the notions of collective zones of proximal development and sociogenesis – that we come to knowledge by taking part in activities where individuals relate to a greater collective that evolves over time and where language and material artifacts function as structural resources. A review of some recent research in CALL and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) seeks to form a backdrop for this study of collective language production. Empirically the argument is illustrated and supported by selected videotape transcripts of learner interactions involving the use of a wiki in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. The study shows that learners work in and across activity types that create tensions between individual and collective, institutional and novel practices, but that the wiki also holds the potential for collective knowledge advancement and language development.