As a university student, Avnish Desai was advised by his professors to never rely on Wikipedia content alone for his research. “In fact, some discourage us from even using the website as a source of basic research,” he said.
Now, as a fourth-year student in finance and corporate communications at the Singapore Management University, Desai, 24, has been asked as part of a class assignment to help create his own wiki page on digital media in India.
Although wikis, with their collaborative approach and vast reach online, have been around for at least 15 years, their use as a general teaching tool in higher education is still relatively recent. But an increasing number of universities are now adopting them as a teaching tool.
As part of that trend, a handful of Singapore universities are using the wiki platform as a way to engage students.
Michael Netzley, assistant professor of corporate communication in the business school at the Singapore Management University, said students’ learning improved when they embarked on wiki projects.
“Rather than trying to read a textbook and regurgitate it for an exam, in order to write coherent segments, you have to intellectually understand it and be able to craft your own words, and that is a higher level of learning challenge,” he said. “All the research on learning theory suggests this is in fact a better way to learn.”
Netzley, whose students include Desai, started using wikis as a teaching tool in 2007. This semester, he asked the students in his Digital Media in Asia class to document the digital communication landscape of a given country, build a wiki page, and then conduct a one-week public relations campaign to promote it.
“I am trying to simulate exactly what would happen if a PR agency takes on a new client in a new market and must start from scratch,” he said.
Working collaboratively, editing each other’s work and getting feedback, sometimes from outside the classroom, can make students uncomfortable at first .
“It’s not something that we’re used to,” said Stuart Lee, an undergraduate who took Netzley’s class and helped create a wiki page on digital media in Japan.
Netzley acknowledged that during the past three years he had had to change the way he taught with wikis to accommodate his students’ concerns about sharing their incomplete work with others.
“The notion of saving face really complicates the learning process,” he said, “because how do you learn if you’re not able to make mistakes and get feedback?”
To deal with that reluctance, he has let students keep their work on their own computers until they are confident in its quality and ready to publish it online.
“When I started with this project, I did it from the point of view that the world is our stage,” Netzley said. “Students were publishing their wiki on the Web and immediately getting feedback. But it really didn’t work. The students’ feedback was quite clear; my teaching evaluation went down!”
Netzley’s new approach, where the wikis are published for the marketing campaign after being completed, seems to have pleased the students.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service