In my ICTs course, I built a wiki using wetpaint.com – a free website for creating and browsing wikis (popular alternatives include; Pbwiki.com and Wikispaces.com). At first glance, the majority of wikis on Wetpaint appear to be ‘fan sites.’ However, like blogs, wiki technology can be transferred and applied in an educational setting.
The process of creating a wiki using Wetpaint.com was surprisingly easy and following instruction, could be accomplished by all students with basic computer skills. After a couple of practice wikis (http://www.letscarpool.wetpaint.com/ and http://www.amateurartists.wetpaint.com/), I decided to create a wiki that could be used by high-school visual arts students. My wiki site "Visual Art Space: A Place to Share" can be found at http://www.visualartspace.wetpaint.com/. The wiki is designed as a place for art students to; connect, share their artworks, announce exhibitions, and discuss anything art related; from issues they are having with creating a particular piece to tips for other students in using a particular medium.
After signing up for a wetpaint.com account, the process of creating my wiki involved three easy steps. Firstly details for the wiki site were entered, namely; the site name, URL, a description of what the site is about and the general category (in this case “Arts”). Editing preferences where also chosen. I decided anyone who joins my wiki site can edit it, add threads, add pages and the like, but no edits would be anonymous. This first step is shown in the image below.
The second step, involved selecting the site layout and confirming the site name.
The third step, was simply matter of completing a Captcha for security and site creation.
Once the “Visual Art Space” wiki was created, wetpaint asked me to email invitations to my contacts who may want to join and collaborate on the site. If I was teaching a high school art class and created the wiki for their use, it is here that I would enter the email addresses of my students (or other art students in the school) and send them an invitation to join the site. This wiki however, would be most beneficial for its users if art students from different high schools collaborated on the site. Therefore, if I intended this site for practical use, I would also inform art teachers or principals at other high schools (in my local area and beyond), asking them to pass on the invitation to art students at their school. In this way, a community of art students from geographically distant locations could unite and share on the wiki.
From here, it would be a matter of art students joining and collaborating on the wiki. With the ‘easy edit’ icon and ‘what you see is what you get’ software on wetpaint.com, students could edit the content on the wiki pages, without the need for advanced computer skills or HTML knowledge. There are pages/ features automatically available for the students to use. One such feature is a discussion forum. Here, students could post questions about an art assignment they are having trouble with, discuss artistic techniques, their favourite artists, introduce themselves or even create unrelated discussion threads in the “off-topic” forum.
There is also a ‘News’ feature where student could add their own news item to the site (for example details of an upcoming art exhibition). News could also be added via RSS feeds or twitter. For example, news from the Queensland Art Gallery website or a class blog could be fed directly to the wiki’s news page via RSS. Collaborators can also comment on news items. In the example given above, students could comment as to whether or not they will be attending the art exhibition.
The photo gallery feature would be particularly useful on this wiki as individuals can create their own album and upload images of their artworks. In the Visual Art Space wiki you will find “Karlee’s Photo Album” where I have upload photographs of some of my artworks for demonstration purposes. There is also a tool which enables users to create a thread in the discussion forum about individual photos. In much the same way, students could also use the video gallery to share videos from 'YouTube' or 'MSN Video' of their artworks, experiences etc. Moreover, this wiki coud be used by art students to collaborate and problem solve on the wiki ('Relate'), sharing their artworks and developing an online gallery of work ('Create'), which could be viewed by teachers, peers, parents and other interested parties ('Donate').
Creating the “Visual Art Space: A Place to Share” wiki opened my eyes to the myriad of applications for wikis in the classroom and the way in which this ICT complements contemporary learning design theory. My next post will discuss various ways in which wikis can be both used to teach and be used by students.
Wikis...
As fun for students to use, as the word is to say!
