Abstract:

The “wiki” technology was developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995. The concept of a wiki “is at once both so simple and so novel that it is difficult to grasp.” The term wiki was coined by Ward Cunningham on a visit to Hawaii, where he took the "Wiki Wiki" or "quick" shuttle between terminals at the airport[1]. The term now describes a “freely expandable collection of interlinked Web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information – a database, where each page is easily edited by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client. The defining feature of wikis is that each page has a “edit this page” link that takes users to an editing view of the page’s content. In education Wikis can essentially be used for anything where collaboratively developed content is desirable, and can make it easier for learners to co-construct and share knowledge and information.
An open source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. In an open source model, instructor and students can work together to modify lesson plans, textbooks or full courses, sharing it with other educational communties without cost. This kind of cooperation and knowledge sharing is driving open education as a viable solution to equalizing access to educational opportunities[2].
This paper reports on a work in progress at the University of Jaen. In this work students share their class notes thanks to Wikis pages. Because students can post information to the wiki, the role of the instructor changes from the “classical“ authority to a partner with students in their own learning. Knowledge no longer exclusively comes from a single instructor; rather, a wiki enables all students to contribute to each other’s learning. “Wiki use reflects the view of an instructor as one who facilitates information sharing among learners rather than simply transmitting knowledge from themselves to their students.”[3]. The instructor places skeletal lecture notes onto an ILIAS site, and students flesh them out with materials they have learned in class...” Students create a study aid for their classmates, and the instructor sees what students took away from the lecture. Students were also told to review each others’ note and enhance or correct them if necessary. As the exercise continued, the instructor would also monitor the wiki, posting notes or comments if any note was inappropriate or an answer was incorrect. In this way, we propose the use of wiki as a tool to facilitate the progressively adaptation to new sceneries and guidelines of the European High Education Area (EHEA).
[1]Cunningham, W., & Leuf, B.. The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. (2001)
[2]Atkins, D., Brown, J., & Hammond, A., (2007). A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. February 2007.
[3]Mindel, J. L., & Verma, S. (2006). Wikis for Teaching and Learning. Communications of AIS , 18 (1), 2-38.

Keywords: Wiki; OSC; ILIAS; b-Learning.

Keywords:

innovation, technology, research project.