Adding power to educational and research wikis with Semantic MediaWiki

Mediawikis are used for various purposes in both education and research. This short position paper and summary of a talk submitted to SMWCon Fall 2013 attempts to catalog some use cases and then discuss how Semantic Mediawiki extensions could enhance the user experience in educational and research wikis. In this first version we shall draw a lot on our own experience with EduTechwiki and related sister sites. We shall focus on education, but include informal research wikis, since sometimes the two are combined.

Objectives

The aim of this contribution is to create a small informal community that will push reflections a bit further, for example:

• document other use cases
• identify a place to share SMW vocabularies, templates, forms, etc.
• get some advice from experienced developers
• suggest new features of general interest for existing extensions
• (maybe) create plans for development.

We also aim participating in the creation of an educational track at WikiSym 2014.

Wikis in education

Educational use of wikis is widespread, probably in the hundreds of thousands, e.g. Wikispaces alone claims to support over 10 million teachers and students in over 100'000 wikis. MediaWikis are much less popular. However, in particular in higher education, the technology is popular since it supports the creation of large and sophisticated sites for a large variety of purposes. There is an extensive literature on the educational use of wikis, addressing for example technology acceptance issues, various forms collaborative and project-oriented learning, professional development, sharing of course notes, creation and use of open textbooks, etc. Few publications seem to document educational use of MediaWikis (e.g. Höller & Reisinger), some document using Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia (e.g. Carver et al. 2010; Chiang et al. 2012) or Wikibooks (e.g. Baltersen, 2010) and even less the use of Semantic Mediawiki (e.g. Dimitrova, 2011)

Hurdles

Judd, Kennedy and Cropper (2010), in a study, found little evidence of collaboration despite adopting a learning design that was intended to support it. This matches our own experience across various settings and prior literature, e.g. Cole (2009)

Bibliography

• Baltzersen, R. K. (2010). Radical transparency: Open access as a key concept in wiki pedagogy. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(6), 791-809. HTML

• Carver, B., Davis, R., Kelley, R. T., Obar, J. A., & Davis, L. L. (2012). Assigning Students to Edit Wikipedia: four case studies. E-Learning and Digital Media, 9(3), 273–283. PDF

• Chiang, C. D., Lewis, C. L., Wright, M. D. E., Agapova, S., Akers, B., Azad, T. D., Banerjee, K., et al. (2012). Learning chronobiology by improving Wikipedia. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 27(4), 333–36. HTML

• Cole, M. (2009). Using wiki technology to support student engagement: Lessons from the trenches. Computers & Education, 52(1), 141-146.

• Dimitrova, Vania; Lydia Lau, Rebecca O'Rourke, "Semantic Social Scaffolding for Capturing and Sharing Dissertation Experience," IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 74-87, Jan.-March, 2011 Abstract, PDF Preprint

• Judd, Terry; Gregor Kennedy and Simon Cropper, Using wikis for collaborative learning: Assessing collaboration through contribution, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2010, 26(3), 341-354. HTML, PDF

• Lau Lydia; Vania Dimitrova, Sirisha Bajanki, Kathrin Kaufhold, Alex Le Bek, Rebecca O'Rourke and Aisha Walker (2009). Semantic social scaffolding for communities of practice in dissertation writing. TEL-CoPs'09', PDF.