COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITY WIKI

Collaborative Educational Activity (WIKI )

Title of the Activity: Wikis to stimulate research at NNMC

Description of Activity: In a wiki-based activity, participants work to collaboratively construct a document designed to meet educational and research objective.

Introduction
Wiki pages are easy to create, search, edit, view, and access from any location at any time.

Activity Goal and Objectives

Goal
The goal of a wiki activity is to allow participants (in this case: researchers at NNMC) to learn and demonstrate that learning through the collaborative document creation.

Objectives
By the end of this activity, participants will:
1. Be able to create a wiki for research team collaboration
2. Be able to post a document, and format text with a wiki editor (embed links, import images, etc).
3. Work collaboratively with other participants to better understand and succeed at group process (identify and provide quality feedback to discussion postings)
4. Learn more about the selected topic of posted document, express and share ideas, suggest improvements to current processes.
5. Synthesize a collective work into a team project, post it on wiki.

Appropriate Content Areas: All

Prerequisites:
Participants need to have the pre-existing knowledge related to the content on the given topic.

Materials and Resources:
The instructor needs to create a wiki space for the activity.
The participants need Internet access to the wiki space.

Lesson Outline and Procedure:
1. The instructor creates a wiki space for the participants.

2. Within that wiki space, participants collaboratively create a document on a given topic:
• One of the participants (Team Lead) will post a document (wiki page) for a team collaborative work (document editing)
• Participants edit a document /wiki page (please see instructions provided below): click on the edit tab on the green bar at the top of the page ;
make the changes you want to the fields and click the save button.
Detailed instructions on how to create a wiki page are available at http://www.umich.edu/~umctdocs/Wiki.html

3. The completed project (group document) can be shared with a larger group, peer reviewed by the fellow researchers, directly assessed by the instructor, and often serves as a continual resource for the students.

Examples:
From http://nnmcresearch.wikispaces.com/Collaborative+Project_+RCRS+Data

Teaching Strategies:
• Provide clear instructions on wiki use (include exactly what a wiki is)
• For the first wiki assignment, provide a little extra time as participants become used to working with the new tool.
• The instructor contributes directly to the wiki: provides guiding questions within the wiki, adds headings that the participants need to complete with information.

Guiding Questions for this Activity(Collaborative Project_RCRS Data):
What do we already know about research completion during 2006-2008? How does question 1 relate to question 2? If we change some policies (# of IRB revisions required) can the research completion data be improved? How we can promote research at NNMC?

Timeline:
Wiki activities can be ongoing throughout a term of a project. Some activities (post a document) may only take 5 minutes, other activities (edit document) may take 15 min to 24 hours for participants to add to a collective document. Normally, a collaborative project within a wiki may take 2-10 hours to complete (when participants are not obligated with other activities)

Lesson Evaluation:
How did the participants like the activity?
End of activity evaluations should ask the following:
- usefulness and learning accomplished through the wiki activity;
- how the participants are enjoying various aspects of the wiki activity;
- are the participants learning and/or participating.

Participants learning will be verified by completion of activity based on the activity rubric

Participation can be assessed in group exercises or discussion session.

A rubric can also be set up by instructor to understand grading criteria of this activity; Team Work Rubric Generator is available at http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/

Additional Readings:
• Augar, N., Raitman, R. & Zhou, W. (2004). Teaching and learning online with wikis. Paper presented at the ASCILITE Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education 2004 Conference. Perth, WA.
• Educational wikis (2007). Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/
• Farmer, J. (2004, June 10). The wide world of wiki: Choosing a wiki for an element of a fully online undergraduate course, Incorporated Subversion, Retrieved January 18, 2007, from http://radio.weblogs.com/0120501/2004/06/10.html
• Giles, J. (2005) Internet encyclopaedias go head to head Nature, 438, 900-901 (15 Dec 2005). Peer Review: Comparison of errors in 50 Britannica and Wikipedia articles
• Lamb, B. (2004). Wide open spaces: Wikis, ready or not. Educause Review, 39(5). pp. 36-48. Retrieved January 18, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp
• Mader, S. (2007). A wiki-based book. Retrieved January 18, 2007, from http://www.wikiineducation.com/display/ikiw/Home
• Mader, S. (2005). OpenSpectrum: A Wiki-based learning tool for Spectroscopy that anyone can edit Paper presented at the Winter 2005 CONFCHEM: Trends and New Ideas in Chemical Education - an online conference Jan-Feb 2005.
• Wiki's wild world Nature, 438, 890 (15 December 2005)