(2007-10-25) Science Wiki High School

Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman are presenting a paper at WikiSym about their attempt to use the Science Online Wiki in a High School Advanced Placement class (Math And Science). Students often worked in parallel during class and found that edit conflicts frequently slowed their progress... Mr. Grant likewise had difficulty grading the collaborative assignment. He found parsing page histories laborious and uninformative and had difficulty understanding how each student had contributed to the collaboration. They conclude: If wiki is to become a readily adoptable construction kit that supports Knowledge Building communities in schools, the tools need to foster collaborative practices by making it easy for students to work together and for teachers to assess collaborative work. If teachers cannot assess collaborative wiki work, then we cannot expect wiki to be adopted for Formal Education, despite the potential learning gains for students. Maybe it isn't the wiki that needs to be redesigned, but the Formal Education.

Mark Bernstein notes the added noise from worrying about Standardized Test scores. This signals, in the US, that research in academic computing might be essentially over. If all changes are likely to have negative impact, what's the point? Maybe they need to find a local Sudbury School to work with?