This chapter introduces the description of wiki appropriation. It considers the tool inclusion in an online educational innovation, supported in student and group-centered learning approach, to improve the quality of the blended learning offered. It states that the university course of educational technology, through wiki application as an appropriated methodology, beyond its consideration as a Web 2.0 tool, gives the opportunity to enhance the student protagonism into the deepening of the conceptual field of the subject by a collaborative knowledge construction. The evidence shows that the application worth to develop the learning strategies towards the student comprehension and its social skills in universities contexts. The results shows that the transformation of reactive attitudes into creative ones is a long process of change mediated by emotions and metacognitive work. Both facilitate a change of the students’ focus, perspectives, and mentalities, understandable by the help of collective learning, among diverse variables.
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This case related to the incorporation of the Wiki tool as part of the Web2.0 Internet proposal in education, was/is an education- technological innovation of the Course of Educational Technology – undergraduate level- in the Education Sciences Dept, in the School of Humanities of the National University of La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. This experience has taken place since 2005 and continues today. The team who worked in this experience was lead by the author of the present case, full professor of the course. Nevertheless, the same group of professionals is practicing this innovation and others in connection, at the CEDIPROE Foundation, directed by the above mentioned author. She has worked in both institutions for more than 18 years leading different programs and introducing new technologies from the educational technology field.
Although the main objectives of both educational organizations, is the training of teachers and faculty– basically with the articulation of ICT in the curricula -, the main emphasis on their tasks lies on research (action and evaluation) as their important role.
The CEDIPROE Center, -Centro de Diseño, Producción y Evaluación de Recursos Multimediales para el Aprendizaje-, was created in 1990 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
We have to remember that Wiki (from the Hawaiian which means “fast”) is a collaborative and interactive website, where users read, write, produce, edit, etc. diverse information by consulting and progressive agreements, keeping a history of changes which allows to easily access the information accumulated while it is shared.
Wiki is a simple online database which works as a piece of server software that allows users, to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser. A Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax to create new pages and cross-link between internal pages on the fly. Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself (Duffy & Axel, 2006). In our case the information is referred to the concepts of the educational technology field .
Wiki is an intensely accessible and collaborative hypertext software which challenges and gives greater complexity to the traditional notions of - as well as access too, - authorship, editing, and publishing. Brian Lamb (2004) points out that in Wiki anyone can change anything, using a simplified hypertext markup. It includes Wiki Page titles which are meshed together and its content is egoless, timeless, and never finished.
It is an open structure tool, which allowed participants to add new pages, or change the content of existing pages: this was the way which was implemented in the blended course of Educational Technology. This experience still takes place today, with the introduction of new trends which provoke changes towards the improvement of the higher learning course of Education Sciences at the University with the goal of training professors.