Article Review 11

Why Wikis?

Article Summary:

This article presented the idea that teachers should use Web 2.0 programs such as Wikipedia and other wiki applications in order to help students understand concepts more clearly. The author’s reasoning was that traditional classrooms and textbooks encourage memorization of facts and figures. Such learning results in the students gaining knowledge, but they have little understanding of either their knowledge or of the concepts which give subjects meaning. Some interesting ideas that the author brought up included the points that wikis require collaborative writing and that they result in a sharing of student’s ideas publicly. Since collaborative writing requires students to read material thoroughly and apply their knowledge to give concepts meaning in order to contribute to the group writing project, such activities can result in a more thorough education for students.

Response to Article:

I definitely agree with the author's ideas that the use of wikis can be an effective education tool for helping students apply their knowledge in ways that will increase their understanding. I also think it is very important to consider the fact that having students participate in creating wikis means that their ideas become public. During my time in graduate school, my courses have begun to use Blackboard discussion boards to share ideas and post student papers. In many ways, I felt that having these papers viewed publicly by all of my classmates inspired me to put more effort into them. In a typical classroom, the student is writing for no one else but the teacher. I believe that once the student knows many people will be viewing their work rather than just a single person, their motivation to do better increases. As a future biology teacher, I think that it would be very interesting to have students take the content of their papers and try to add new material to different articles on Wikipedia. Having their work become public and having the students become generators of knowledge rather than just being receivers could really enhance their learning.