Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom

Abstract

As Prensky (2001) observes, "Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach " (1). Prensky sees today's students as digital natives while most of today's teachers remain digital immigrants. In particular, today's educators are acculturated to a print paradigm while students are increasingly products of a digitally-based secondary-oral paradigm. Happily for educators, electronic and cyber technologies can potentially combine the best aspects of both print and secondary-oral paradigms, allowing educators to move freely across the print-oral continuum. One cyber technology enabling this movement is the wiki, a unique interface where information is not fixed (as in a print model) but fluid and flexible to meet the needs of the community (as in the pre-literate age). In this article we describe how teaching and learning have changed across oral, print, and secondary-oral paradigms; in turn, after addressing some controversies over the use of wikis as scholarly and educational resources, we advocate the use of wikis as a teaching and learning tool. Technology and Learning Paradigms As technologies have changed through the millennia, so have teaching methods. From the one-to-one oral teaching style of the early agrarian age (pre-writing and pre-printing cultures) to the apprenticeship system and one-to-many lectures of the pre-industrial ages (writing and print cultures), teaching was predominantly