Abstract:

The development of WWW (World Wide Web) has entered a new era called web2.0 during the past few years. web2.0 emphasizes interactivity, sharing, participation on the web and conducting social activities through the web. This research explores an innovative utilization of this trend by establishing a wiki platform as the web2.0 environment for conducting group activities for visual art courses. Through our research on various web-based instructional platforms and wiki applications, it was found that web-based art-related courses are rarely developed. To investigate the possibilities of applying wiki to visual art and culture education, we established the pedagogical “Taiwan native art and culture wiki”. We designed two parts of group activities for two levels of students (university and high school) to see how students might use the wiki site to participate in the learning, sharing and interaction with each other. The high school’s part has three sessions of assignments with wiki facilities for the familiarity, the cooperation and the sharing activities on the Taiwan native art and culture wiki. In the university part, we first encourage students to use the wiki to demonstrate and document their artifacts. Then we ask them to evaluate each other’s product on the wiki with the guidance of the instructors. According to the questionnaires from the students of these two experiments, most of the students are satisfactory with the new wiki interaction style. The degree of participation is fairly good as well. We have concluded that the wiki is a feasible and promising tool to enhance group activities for visual art related instruction. Our research also show a majority of positive responses to the wiki-based implementation of web2.0. Relevant issues such as usability, effectiveness, the support for communication, presentation and evaluation … etc., can be further explored based upon this study.

Keywords:

wiki, web2, 0, interactivity, sharing, participation, pedagogical group activities, visual.