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    The Science of Spectroscopy: Collaborative curriculum development using a Wiki

    Stewart Mader
    Brown University

    A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person’s course materials.

    As The Science of Spectroscopy, a well-known educational web site, has grown in popularity, we needed an efficient way to include the growing number of suggestions and additons coming from our users. Editing a static website based on emailed feedback was inefficient as we had to balance it with competing demands on our time. The website was converted into a wiki, so that the growing number of readers can now become writers and collaboratively build a richer and more useful tool.

    View the screencast (28:59); will load directly in a Flash-enabled browser.

    Download the Quicktime version (.mov, 35M).

    Get the full paper (PDF).
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    Visit the web site and wiki: The Science of Spectroscopy

    Using Wiki in Education - my blog which includes a list of wiki tools, ideas and example uses, interviews with people using and developing wiki tools, and a wiki where you can submit your ideas and examples.

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    Tags: Wikis, Teaching,

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    2 Responses to “The Science of Spectroscopy: Collaborative curriculum development using a Wiki”

    Dan Karleen Says:
    April 7th, 2006 at 10:00 am

    Thanks for the informative presentation. Will you say a few more words about models people are using to develop curricula from material associated with the wiki? Which models show promise? In particular, how will curricula keep up with the pace of change in wiki activity?

    Stewart Mader Says:
    April 7th, 2006 at 10:47 am

    Dan,
    One model I’m working with right now involves multiple faculty teaching a freshman level science course. Historically, the responsibility for teaching courses like these rotates to different people every year, and the content either gets “reinvented” every time new people teach, or carried forward sporadically based on whether the outgoing teacher is willing to share materials with the incoming teacher. Enter the wiki - if all the teachers involved put their materials on the wiki, they can then collaboratively build and refine the curriculum, enabling it to better keep pace with changes in science. The wiki can then serve as part of each person’s course materials, and can become a platform for in-class, student collaboration as well.

    Another model is to use the wiki to collect data from students which is then used to put lecture material in the context of that data to make it more “real” and relatable to the students. This can complement Just-in-Time Teaching (http://www.jitt.org) a teaching strategy which links a Web-based “feedback loop” with in class active learning. Here’s the official description from Gregor Novak, one of the authors of JiTT, “Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT for short) is a teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based study assignments and an active learner classroom. Students respond electronically to carefully constructed web-based assignments which are due shortly before class, and the instructor reads the student submissions “just-in-time” to adjust the classroom lesson to suit the students’ needs. Thus, the heart of JiTT is the “feedback loop” formed by the students’ outside-of-class preparation that fundamentally affects what happens during the subsequent in-class time together.” The wiki can make a perfect gathering place for students to submit feedback and interact with each other in a more tightly-knit community.

    More ideas are brewing on my blog: http://www.ikiw.org (for a full list, click the “wiki” link in the list on the lower left side of the blog home page).
    Stewart