Is this the Wiki era?

The ubiquitous blog has become very popular for one-to-many publication over recent years. Whilst blogs provide various degrees of feedback on postings, they do have limitations. For example, they are not an effective means for many-to-many applications, such as producing a collaborative document.

The wiki concept has been around for some time and there are many different software implementations to suit most situations. Even virtual learning environments - such as Moodle - incorporate wikis as a resource for course design. In fact, the Moodle website makes extensive use of the wiki format to produce and publish its own documentation.

One of the most prominent examples of a wiki is, of course, the popular and very extensive Wikipedia. Thinking of a wiki implementation in terms of such a large scale would be a daunting prospect for any prospective user.

Gradually, it seems that the wiki is beginning to be used for collaborative work within educational and professional development settings. David Warlick, for example, is a great fan of wikis and highlights both the advantages and disadvantages of wikis in his own presentations. Increasingly, forward thinking educational conferences and organisations are beginning to use wikis to capture and share the views of registered users on various topics.

As an educator, it is best to consider a wiki as an interactive resource for small-scale collaborative work. We have been working with various groups on developing the use of wikis for a range of collaborative activities. Not only does it provide online access for a group of users anytime and anywhere, changes and edits to the content are logged and can be tracked over time, making it easy to moderate content or re-publish an earlier version. It is unadvisable to have free-for-all access to a wiki for obvious reasons!

If you are an educator working with a small group who need to develop a shared document, the wiki offers tremendous scope for such many-to-many collaboration as well as extending the range of e-learning experiences. One challenge is selecting a wiki implementation, although there are also a small number of online wikis that you can choose to register with. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the ease of creating a "solo" blog rather than a "group" or "community" wiki. As our collective knowledge and understanding of using wikis in educational settings evolves, it is possible that the wiki era within education could soon be with us.

E-Safety and E-Learning

The advantages and disadvantages of emerging Web 2.0 technologies for effective and personalised learning are being identified every day. As educators, one concern that we all share is the need to ensure a sensible approach so that learners, whether young or old, are safe when online. The key question is this:

• How can we develop effective policy and practice on e-safety for e-learning?

Rightly, many different groups including policy makers, educators, parents, carers and interest groups are becoming increasingly concerned at the way in which social networking websites are being exploited by unscrupulous people. Children and vulnerable young people are most at risk. In the US, the "Deleting Online Predators Act 2006" is proposing to remove the problem by banning such websites (Download PDF). In effect, the consequence of such an action would be to remove many of the valuable e-learning sources that are currently being used with many learners.

The Association of Colleges NILTA - the voice of the Further Education sector for ICT and e-learning in the UK - has raised concerns about the route to censorship in a recent post "DOPA, social networks and keeping young people safe". In particular, they emphasise the impact this would have on the development of online learning and for disadvantaged groups.

"In addition to commercial ownership, the bill defines social network sites in terms of those which elicit personal information, include a personal profile, support blogging or journals, and enable communication amongst users" (AoC NILTA, 2006).

Within educational communities, applying such a definition would simply result in sites such as Blogger falling directly into this category. This and many other similar sites are already being used effectively by educators to develop imaginative, effective and supervised learning activities for both children and young people. Removing access to such sites within the managed learning environment of a school or college would prevent some young people and their educators from particpating in carefully planned e-learning programmes. Without private access to the internet this could also further aggravate the "digital divide".

There are very genuine worries about the kind of information and material that is readily accessible and can be shared via social networking sites. Whilst organisations such as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre are undertaking important activities in this area, the real dangers and potential risks for personal safety and well-being are a concern of us all. BECTA provides some good resource material about e-safety.

The essential task is to ensure an effective strategy for e-safety within learning communities. All young people, educators, parents, carers and communities need to accept responsibility and act accordingly, promoting understanding amongst children and young people about the benefits and pitfalls of social networking technologies in our digital age.

Retrieval skills: high or low?

Somewhere deep within the internal systems of the internet companies providing search engines will be information about the ways that we all use the facilities they provide. The most common will be the frequency of use for search words or terms.

Most learners with access to the internet use and depend on the kind of search facilities provided by the likes of Google, Yahhoo! and MSN Search to locate information. But what proportion actually make use of the advanced facilities or common (boolean) operators to refine and narrow down their searches?

There was a time when learners were being encouraged to use higher order skills to locate information and this will still be the case for systems provided in libraries, colleges and universities for specific types of academic search facilities. A particularly powerful approach is using the so called boolean operators to refine the search process. However, it would seem that the ease of access to the internet may encourage learners to depend on low order retrieval skills with search engines. Some search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search, do actually provide advanced options for searches.

On the advanced page (shown above) the range of options on the words used includes finding results with all the words, the exact phrase, at least one of the words or without the words.

However, there are already a range of options that exist in a basic searches. How many learners actually use the readily available common (boolean) operators? Examples include such common operators as OR, "" (the quote operator), - (the minus operator), + (the plus operator), as well as AND or & (the ampersand) can be incorporated along with the specific keyword(s) or phrase(s) to provide greater flexibility and refine searches on the internet.

Ironically, locating the information for your favourite search engine is not always easy and they do not always apply the same operators either!!!

Why not get the search engines to do the work for you buy entering something like "common operators" MSN Search provide a useful list of the common operators with examples, but you will need to scroll down the page to find the list.

For some time, Wyoming State Library has provided a good resource entitled "Finding and Evaluating Information on the Internet" with a section on common search engine operators.

As educators we need to encourage our anytime, anywhere learners to develop and refine their higher order retrieval skills. Perhaps the challenge is for us to start using such techniques ourselves to model good practice!