Abstract:

Due to potential benefits of the wikis they are increasingly gaining popularity in educational settings. In the educational context they have been used for various purposes such as managing research projects, publishing course materials and completing writing assignments. This type of Web 2.0 tool provides a number of useful functions, such as creation of content by multiple users, tracking history of users’ actions, comparison between different editions and roll-back to earlier versions of the wiki, allowing teachers to monitor learners’ co-authoring process. Because of these functions, wikis have been claimed to facilitate collaborative writing, group discussion and interaction. However, wikis are not inherently collaborative.
After a brief review of relevant literature on the importance of interaction in learning process this communication presents some preliminary results on the use of wikis by pre-service elementary school teachers.The implementation of virtual lab notebooks hosted within a wiki environment in the scope of a course on biology is described. Students´ perceptions regarding the implementation of the wiki, namely, challenges and potential benefits are explored. In order to achieve this goal, participants were asked to write a reflexive essay about their use of the wiki. A content analysis was done on the data gathered.
An additional goal is to understand the kind of interaction promoted by the wiki. For this reason, the individual contributions to the wiki that occurred during the learning process were analyzed and categorized. Follow-up interviews were conducted to gain insight into students’ decision-making process.
The results are discussed in view of identifying factors that may lead to a more successful integration of the wikis in science lessons and to improve pre-service teachers’ confidence in using Web 2.0 tools for pedagogical purposes.

Keywords:

Wiki, collaborative teaching & learning, lab notebook, students’ interaction, pre-service teachers.