Wiki Use That Increases Communication and Collaboration

The author of this article, Robyn Davidson, is responsible for teaching a postgraduate financial accounting course at the University of Adelaide. The majority of the student cohort is made up of international students who have English as their second language. The article discusses the use of the in-built wiki functionality within the Blackboard platform, which was used to facilitate a group project for students.

I chose this article for discussion for a number of reasons. Firstly, the makeup of the student cohort which closely matches our own at the Study Centres. Secondly, I felt the discussion around developing soft skills such as communication and collaboration tied in to recent topics which we had been focusing on in the Learning and Growing meetings. Lastly, I thought the idea of trying to introduce asynchronous resources into the Study Support and Library programs may assist with the difficulty I and others have reported in getting students to engage with content during live workshops.

During the Learning and Growing meeting a number of discussion points arose. Most of us were unaware that Blackboard had this wiki functionality in-built and after brief testing it seems that the Study Centres do have this feature enabled. It was also noted that the Blackboard interface in general, and likely the wiki module also, can be quite clunky and difficult to navigate which may provide a barrier to implementation. It was also mentioned in the article that there were some technical difficulties encountered during the program so it would be wise to conduct a more thorough testing before looking to use this feature.

The original article was published in 2006 and there have been many new platforms and apps developed since which also facilitate collaboration, including Padlet and Trello. These platforms are designed to be more intuitive and aesthetically pleasing, and have already been implemented in some workshops to facilitate live feedback from students. However, while they do have options which require authentication, this increases the complexity which makes it difficult to implement in a live setting and the accounts are not necessarily linked to a student’s university credentials which would make them unsuitable for official assessment. It was also noted that we must be mindful of privacy policies when using these platforms.

Charles Sturt also provide access to a platform called Thinkspace which allows staff and students to create simple websites and blogs. Some discussion arose around developing a project for a student led page which could be used as a tool for students to develop their communication skills. During this discussion it was suggested that we could try and create our own page to create a record of the discussions in the Learning and Growing meetings and provide a place for reflection and action to occur.

The discussion in this meeting did inspire a thought for me, which was to create a program tailored to a specific assessment of a single subject; my initial thought was the presentation assessment of the ITC571 subject. My idea would be to create a repository of asynchronous resources (possibly through Interact2 or Campuswire)to support a series of short workshops (3 -4 @ approx 30 mins each) which would cover the basics of creating a presentation using various apps (e.g. Canva, Powerpoint). The goal would be for students to collaborate on creating a presentation, developing not only the skills and knowledge needed to complete their assessment task, but also their communication and collaboration skills. Overall this idea seemed to have a positive reception so I’d like to continue to develop it, a suggestion during the meeting were to contact the course coordinators, not only to gauge interest but to ensure the assessment task will remain the same going forward.

I really appreciated the discussion and ideas brought forth from everyone’s contribution during the meeting. If there’s anything I’ve overlooked, anything new that you’ve thought of since, any suggestions on the presentation workshop, or just to let me know you’ve read the whole post, please add a comment below!