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 – which facilitate 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 on off-hours.

2. Skill exchanges – which permit 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 – 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 – who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals and freelances, 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 on texts on a website, exchange documents or organize themselves in groups.

Remembering the time of study, it becomes clear that the wiki is an ingenious tool for the creation of lecture notes, scripts and laboratory exercises in electronic form.

It is understandable that it ...

is practical if the tutor can view the development process and correct it if necessary.
it is necessary to divide the summary into the individual contributions to the chapters/lectures in order to simplify simultaneous processing
even under this condition, “concurrent editing” conflicts will occur frequently enough
is necessary to create a complete summary 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:

Interactive writing by students, with the mutual inclusion of ideas
An awareness of collective learning
The focus of the analysis is 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

see also

kleiner Leitfaden zum Einsatz in Schulen [German]

Referring pages:

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