Schools
are in the business of preparing their students to be successful in the
world that they will enter. According to Kist (2009), this means that
schools have a responsibility to prepare them to be successful in the
digital world. Web 2.0 technologies afford schools the opportunity to
transform pedagogy to include digital technologies and competencies, and
schools should take advantage of this.
One
such web 2.0 tool that provides opportunity for teachers to teach in
ways that they have previously been unable is wikis. Wikis allow users
to collaboratively work on single projects. In the classroom, they
provide a space for students to work, which is public for the whole
class to vew. This is a totally new way of presenting work, as the work
in progress is made available to the group to see and critique before
it is finished.
The
issue of how, why and when to use wikis in the primary classroom, then,
is one that is pertinent to education today, as are many issues dealing
with web 2.0 technologies (Moyle, 2010; Way & Webb, 2007). As
businesses evolve to incorporate web 2.0 technologies in their practice,
they are increasingle seeking recruits into their companies who are
conversant with such technologies, but more than that, are comfortable
and able to work in the way that they require. In his article in the
Sydney Morning Herald on the 18/3/2008, Kirk Shinkle proposes that
business executives, more and more, are looking for ways to increase the
speed with which their employees can communicate. One such way is in
the use of collaborative publishing. Rather than editing a document
once, then passing it around and waiting for it to get back to you,
businesses are seeking to bring people to the documents, rather than the
other way around. The hope, then, is that the speed with which they
can be completed is much faster than it has been in the past as users
can edit there and then and changes can be approved, edited and
discussed as they come up.
This
issue, then, is relevant to education today as teachers seek to prepare
the students they teach for the world they will enter when they leave
school. More than that, though, much research on the use of wikis and
other web 2.0 tools in schools is also concerned with whether or not the
use of such tools can assist in the academic development of students.
According to Gray et al (2010), Web2.0 tools can enhance learning
through the interactions that take place between other participants and
online tools. They can improve communication skills, facilitate higher
cognitive functions, and develop technological skills. If this is true
then the question as to whether or not these tools should be used in
schools becomes instead a question of how these tools might be best used
in schools as to be of the greatest benefit to the students that use
them.
Wikis
offer an opportunity for teachers to teach reading, writing and editing
skills in a manner that has not before been seen. Through the use of
wikis, students are able to create, edit and improve upon both their and
their peers’ work, whilst maintaining the ability to undo all changes
at any time. This makes the issue of using wikis in the classroom
relevant to education today, as teachers are being asked to rethink
their teaching pedagogy to include the possibilities that tools such as
wikis afford.
