Thread:Talk:SMWCon Fall 2013/Adding power to educational and research wikis with Semantic MediaWiki/A couple of questions/reply

Hi, thanks for the comments !! I will expand the article to address your questions a bit more seriously once I get the ok to do so :) I just answer quickly here (Saturday night brainstorming ...)

1) Why seeing a wiki as a whole is so valuable?

Two groups of reasons:
 * Learning is about connecting and confronting ideas. If a learner strictly sticks to his/her piece, then he/she might miss a bigger picture. E.g. if you write a piece about MOOCs and don't link to educational TV, rapid e-learning, connectivism, etc. you may miss the idea that MOOCs are just either old cake with a few additions that made it interesting or maybe something that is radically new. Also, in a wiki learners should evolve as a community, i.e. other learners will miss the connections too.
 * Educational wikis tend to become a big mess very fast. I.e. knowledge produced by the participants will be "lost" unless they link to their piece, use appropriate categories and so forth. In addition, all participants will have trouble to understand what is "going on" in class, e.g. teacher doesn't know what students produce, students don't see other's work, etc. "Normal" students do not even understand that using a correct title is important. Editorial rules such as in Wikipedia can be enforced, but it takes 1-2 years before students are able to integrate these and understand their reasons. I got empirical evidence from my own experience for that. E.g. some students I trained in good use of wiki, accepted without remorse the suggestion of a clueless teacher to name a piece "group 1: name X, name Y" instead of "gameflow" (subject of their article). Neither the course page nor their contributions were tagged. So the situation is actually much worse: Most teachers in EduTech do not understand how to organize a wiki...

2) Do you see ways wikis can be used as platforms for widely discussed MOOCs?

Depends what you mean by a MOOC. If you talk about the widely dominant xMOOC model (Coursera, EditX) etc. definitely not. These MOOCS are just educational TV + some textbook + a bit of social web + pulse (weekly lessons) + a touch of deschooling, i.e. students intake some information, then hopefully do something getting little bit of help from peer learners. Wikis have no place in that (except as delivery vehicles for OER). Definitely, wikis could be used in so-called cMOOCs where learners are supposed to contribute knowledge. But then show me a student who is able to use a wiki as a whole, i.e. contribute to organized creation of knowledge. Students (like most people) like conversation, not co-construction of knowledge. The latter is not part of our culture. This is why you got all those awful forums on the web instead of documentation ;) Finally, there is a third kind of MOOC: Many people I know are now just renaming their distance teaching courses and even structured OERs to "MOOC". This way they make the decision makers happy, but that's another story....

3) Are wikis just a way to improve learning activities at schools or is it a new way knowledge is transfered and generated in education?

Definitely a way to improve learning activities. However, the way they are being used, these wikis could be replaced by Google Drive or any CMS. E.g. the co-writing activity does it, not the wiki per se. Wikis should be a new way knowledge is transferred and generated, but it's not, although there are some isolated cases where it does happen a bit. Co-construction of knowledge involving learners is a permanent failure in my experience (now 25 years of using Internet and almost 20 of using wikis ...). It's even a near failure on the teacher side. Look at the "success" of Wikiversity.

To conclude, your questions also relate to why we are interested in SMW and SF. Firstly it allows to add some extra structure to the wiki in various ways, e.g. make participants aware that an article is part of a whole. In addition, I hope to also add means to orchestrate, guide and monitor learning activities, i.e. help learners and teachers track what they and others do. Not mentioned in this article (but I will add it): I also decided to "implement" some educational workflow facilities for project-oriented teaching. The big plus of such a thing would be tight integration of what participants do, of what they use (OER materials with the wiki) and what they produce in the wiki.