Wiki Seminars

Ivan Illich on learning webs

Educational resources are usually labelled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference services to educational objects – Facilitates access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories and showrooms like museums and theatres; others can be in daily use in factories, airports or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or during off-hours.

2. Skill exchanges – Permits persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-matching – Using a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference services to educators-at-large – A directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals and freelancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators...could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients. (Illich 1973a: 81)

Using WackoWiki at school or university

Students can work together by collaborating with texts on a website, exchanging documents or organizing themselves in groups. It becomes clear that the wiki is an ingenious tool for the creation of lecture notes, scripts and laboratory exercises in electronic form.

Keep in mind that wikis...

are practical if the tutor can view the development process and correct it if necessary;
might be best organized by dividing the summary into the individual contributions to the chapters/lectures, in order to simplify simultaneous processing;
can be concurrently edited, possibly leading editing conflicts; and
can only be considered fully usable if a complete summary can be generated for offline use, at least for reading.

WackoWiki can also be used for seminar papers, theses or dissertations

These goals can be achieved by using WackoWiki to support:

Interactive writing by students, with the mutual inclusion of ideas
An awareness of collective learning
Analytical focus on textual details
Easy uploading of text and images
Overall simplicity and elegance, overcoming the sometimes cluttered nature of wikis
A search function that enriches the site, with suggestions for related material
Flexibility in the navigation

Using WackoWiki at school or university

WackoWiki can also be used for seminar papers, theses or dissertations

See also