The Wisdom of Crowds
Pre-service teachers' experiences with Wiki: challenges of asynchronous collaboration
Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
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In this paper, I present how I use wikis in my undergraduate courses to try to enhance conceptual comprehension. This WikiConcept research is housed within a theoretical perspective entitled "Communal Constructivism" (CC). According to CC, students construct learning "for" as well as "with" others, ideally leaving their imprint in the development of the course, their school or university, and ideally the discipline. As I argued previously (Fountain, 2005), "The goal of such "co-curricularization" is to influence the quality of ALL work, not just one's own. Quality is to be influenced OVER TIME (long term sustainability of knowledge-Ciffolilli, 2003 & Schwartz, 2004), ACROSS collectivities (across students, over classes, over years, over generations-Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), VIA open-natured projects and TOWARDS creating "impossible public goods" (Ciffolilli, 2003)." While the development and implementation of this conceptual enhancement project across time and collectivities has taken place over several years, the evaluation of these peer-to-peer conceptualizations has just begun (winter, 2007). This paper reports on students (n = 85) reported conceptual comprehension when asked to read and evaluate three differing co-elaborated texts (wiki texts produced by their peers in previous sessions of the same course in technology) regarding the concept of "Cookie". The same "Cookie" text did not "work" (enable greater comprehension) for all students. Many students appreciated a given text for the same reasons (both in terms of form and content) that many others did not. Again, while these results are preliminary, it appears that conceptual comprehension may be enhanced by systematic inclusion of and instance upon engagement with multiple, (and in this case) textual representations of a given concept. Such an insistence upon "a textual plurality around the same, the "always already", is seen as a pedagogical wiki bow towards enacting collaborative structuration research and practice.