دانلود رایگان مقاله زیرساخت ها و دانشنامه فن تعلیم

Abstract

Current theories of wiki pedagogy, which hold that wikis can be valuable tools for collaboration and socially constructing knowledge in the classroom, have not thoroughly considered how wikis are experienced by introductory writing teachers who are not already wiki scholars. With infrastructure as a theoretical lens, this study uses data collected from two immersion narratives to examine how introductory writing instructors use and talk about wikis in their courses. Overall, the study found that the level of a wiki’s embeddedness in a course can have a significant effect on its perceived usefulness and that immersion into using new technologies can have significant outcomes for both teachers and students. These findings suggest that wikis influence and are influenced by the infrastructures they belong to, that there are both physical and ideological barriers to successfully incorporating a wiki into a course infrastructure, and that immersion narratives can be a useful method for studying wikis. Because of these implications, the essay concludes with a call for more classroom-based inquiry as a means of reflective practice.

6. Conclusion

Examining wikis in these contexts has had a significant impact on my teaching, and even more importantly, my work as a writing program administrator. From a teaching perspective, I’ve come to see wikis as highly flexible digital writing tools that can be employed for many different writing aims in a course. In addition to co-authoring documents, wikis can be utilized as course management tools, digital archives, and presentation platforms. Moreover, this flexibility also creates opportunities for students to contribute to and shape the courses in which they participate. This type of participation in a course seems vital in 21st century education, especially when nationalstandardslike the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) outcomes emphasize things like “critical and creative thinking,” “information literacy,” and “teamwork and problem solving” (AACU, 2015, p. 9). While this research does not prove that students will gain proficiency in these areas simply by working with wikis, it does suggest that these tools have the potential to contribute to this learning. As the students in this inquiry suggested, sometimes they like to feel like they have control, they like to imagine the possibilities of a tool like a wiki, they can see co-authoring and online information as complex forms of authorship that require some vetting, and they can solve the problems of using new and sometimes clunky tools to complete required tasks.