E-Tivities With a Wiki Innovative Teaching of English as a Foreign Language

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E-tivities with a Wiki: Innovative Teaching of Englishas a Foreign Language

Andreja Kovacic¹, Goran Bubas², Miran Zlatovic³University of Zagreb, Faculty of Organization and Informatics, Pavlinska 2, 42000 Varazdin, Croatia.¹andreja.kovacic@foi.hr ² goran.bubas @foi.hr ³miran.zlatovic@foi.hr.

Keywords

Social software, wiki, e-tivities, computer aided language learning, English as a foreign language.

1.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Engwiki project started in November 2006 at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics,University of Zagreb, Croatia. The most important goals of this project were: (a) to test theapplicability of wiki technology in teaching English for Special Purposes (ESP) and English as aForeign Language (EFL) at the university level; (b) to innovatively use a wiki by engaging thestudents in various types of individual and collaborative online learning activities (e-tivities); (c) toevaluate each e-tivity so that other second language teachers could choose the most suitable e-tivities for use in computer-aided language learning with wiki or other internet-based technologies;and (d) to disseminate project outcomes over the wiki website, as well as through participation ininternational conferences and publishing of research papers. The open-source MediaWiki(www.mediawiki.org) was used for this project. This paper describes the following elements of theEngwiki project: theoretical background, technology, pedagogy and instructional design, selectionand examples of online pedagogical activities (e-tivities), evaluation of e-tivities and peer evaluationof the project.

1.1.

E-tivities with a wiki in language learning

Interaction between the content creators and the users of a wiki can enable collaborative writing,create a social dimension in online learning and facilitate group creativity and critical thinking.Social software like wikies and weblogs can be used in language learning to encourage studentinteraction and discovery while helping the students acquire the linguistic content of the languagecourse. The flexibility and relative ease of use of wikies make them suitable for the implementationof learning paradigms like collaborative learning spaces and peer-to-peer learning.Traditional learning paradigms, such as cognitivism and constructivism, and novel learning paradigmscan be implemented through the design of online learning activities or e-tivites. A total of 23 e-tivities were (re)designed for use in the Engwiki project. These e-tivities can be categorized as: (1)predominantly open-ended or extensive, with tasks that are apparently non-linguistic and tend tohave a prominent communicative profile (e.g. activities with “free writing” like discussions and shortessays); (2) less open-ended e-tivities, with predominantly intensive (controlled) tasks,characterized by focus on accuracy (e.g. vocabulary-related e-tivities and structure-related e-tivities); (3) information-gap simple e-tivities or 'session openers' (through them students both get toknow each other and become familiar with using a wiki as a tool). Groups of approximately 10-30students were engaged in three separate studies to perform one to four of the analyzed e-tivitiesduring the 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 academic year. Examples of these e-tivities are presented inthis paper, as are the results of their evaluation by students.

1.2.

Project outcome

Most of the 23 analyzed e-tivities with a wiki were positively evaluated by students of the ESP/EFLcourse. Furthermore, the overall use of the wiki was evaluated comparably to other traditional in-class exercises and out-of-class activities such as home assignments. The open source wikitechnology proved to be easy to use, simple and efficient, as well cost effective.

2.

ENGWIKI PROJECT BACKGROUND

The Engwiki project (Engwiki, 2007) started in November 2006 at the Faculty of Organization andInformatics, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The study programs at the Faculty of Organization andInformatics are predominantly oriented toward information systems design, business informatics,and software engineering. Most of the students have a high level of computer/information literacyand broadband access to the Internet from home.Social software (wiki, weblog, del.icio.us) was first used in the blended course “Psychology and theInternet” in April 2006 (Bubas and Kermek, 2007; Bubas et al., 2006) after the second author of thecurrent paper (Goran Bubas, associate professor of Communication Science) attended a workshop oninstructional designed led by Frank Miller

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from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Thesecond author had also developed a workshop on the pedagogy of e-learning with a lesson on onlinepedagogical activities (e-tivities). The idea to use e-tivities with a wiki in teaching English camefrom the first author and project leader (Andreja Kovacic, lecturer) who also predominantlycontributed to the Engwiki project with ideas for e-tivities, preparation for their use in class, actualuse in teaching groups of students, and evaluation of student work. Technical support during theproject was mostly provided by the third author (Miran Zlatovic, teaching assistant). Darko Grabar(webmaster) helped with the design of wiki Main Page, and Kresimir Kudumija (system engineer)installed the wiki and maintained the server. In addition, one student in each school year helped theproject leader in creating instructional web pages and organizing the wiki. The limited amount offinancing (less than EUR 1,000) came from other e-learning projects led by the second author. Theoutcomes of the Engwiki project were evaluated by student surveys which were developed by thesecond author, and the conference reports on the project were written by all three authors of thispaper.The most important goals of the Engwiki project were: (a) to test the applicability of wikitechnology in teaching English for special purpose (ESP) and English as a foreign language (EFL) atthe university level; (b) to innovatively use a wiki by engaging the students in various types ofindividual and collaborative online learning activities (e-tivities); (c) to evaluate each e-tivity so thatother second language teachers could choose the most suitable e-tivities for use in computer-aidedlanguage learning with wiki or other internet-based technologies; and (d) to disseminate projectoutcomes over the wiki website, as well as through participation in international conferences andthe publishing of research papers. Even though Engwiki is an ongoing project, all of the goals havebeen achieved to a considerable degree. The project outcomes have been presented at conferencesin Croatia (Kovacic et al., 2007b) and Italy (Kovacic et al., 2007a). The paper on the project was alsoaccepted for the EDEN 2008 conference in Portugal, and in June 2008 the project will be presentedto teachers interested in e-learning at the

Center for e-learning

of the University of Zagreb, Croatia.A further intention is to disseminate the outcomes of the project to teachers of foreign languagessince it is assessed that the need for resources to implement this project (finance, technology,time/effort) and the required level of computer literacy for this type of e-learning in blendedcourses is rather low in comparison with the potential benefits for both students and teachers. Thedesign of a set of suitable e-tivities and their evaluation, as the first step of effectiveimplementation of blended language learning courses, has already been made with the Engwikiproject.The open-source MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org) was used for the Engwiki project. Due to limitedresources, the wiki system was placed on a server purchased for another e-learning project. Theinstallation of the wiki system, the design of the wiki Main Page, and the work of the student whoadministrated the system for the course activities were financially compensated very modestly, andthe rest of the work was performed on a voluntary basis by the project leader and the other co-authors of this paper.

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Information on another related workshop of Jeff Miller delivered in Croatia (and his briefbiography) is available on the following web page (retrieved May 10, 2008):http://www.carnet.hr/CUC/cuc2005/program/tutorials/list/ws2_miller_absbio.htm

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3.

TECHNOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE ENGWIKI PROJECT

Wiki technology is rather easy to use for those with basic computer/Internet skills. Wiki websites area form of a content management system which allows users to add, edit, or remove the content of awebsite (web pages, text, illustrations, etc.) and also enables tracking of all the changes of theseweb pages over time. The wiki is an efficient tool for collaborative writing, with a potential forinteraction between the content creators and users/readers (***Wiki). As a collaborative platform,wiki systems enable writing, editing and discussing online educational content, creating onlineglossaries and repositories of supplemental educational material, etc. (Reinhold, 2006). Wikitechnology is often used to support various online teaching and learning activities and it can replacethe traditional linear approach of presenting the course content with, for certain fields ofknowledge, a more appropriate networked approach (Bruns, 2005). Wiki can be used for thedevelopment of Internet-based communication literacy, the collective creation of course contentand peer-to-peer learning, and can contribute to students’ learning experience (Bubas et al., 2006;Majchrzack, 2006).Wiki systems may overcome isolation in distance learning and help connect students through synergyin the co-authoring of online documents, in creativity and critical thinking during collaborative groupactivities, and in increased participation in the creation of learning content and in problem solving(Bruns, 2005; Majchrzack, 2006).As a collaborative writing system the wiki manifested following advantages and disadvantages in theEngwiki project (see also: Wei, 2005):

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The advantages were associated with simple use and collaboration, low technologyrequirements for use by students (a web browser), and centralization of created documentswhich supported users' mobility.

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For those with insufficient computer/Internet related skills the major disadvantages of a wikiwere the necessity to learn the wiki syntax to fully exploit the potential for content creationand formatting, non-intuitivity of the more advanced functions for content formatting(headings, tables, navigational structures), as well as lack of automated content structuringsince the hyperlinks and hierarchy/structure between wiki pages had to be manually formed(the latter was also a disadvantage for the instructor).The usability of the wiki tool was evaluated with a student survey of the Engwiki project. One suchanalysis indicated that, for most participants in the ESP curse, the user interface was easy or veryeasy to use (in fact, 81% or 62 out of 77 students rated the user interface this way). Similar findingsrelated to simplicity of wiki use were reported in another study (Désiletes et al., 2005) in which theidentified problems of wiki users were associated with the comprehension of the concept ofhypertext documents and the process of creating and maintaining the hyperlinks between them,image uploading, creating and editing of wiki pages, and collaboration within the wiki environment.In the Engwiki project some of the students had problems with image uploading and creation of newwiki pages, while the evaluation survey also revealed a rather low level of collaboration withingroups and between groups who used the wiki environment to perform various e-tivities. Some of thepotential problems were avoided by initial training with a simple wiki-based e-tivity of all studentswho attended the ESP/EFL courses in the use of wiki for online content creation. However, trainingfocused on the social aspects of wiki usage (collaborative content creation, teamwork, onlinecommunication, etc.) was not performed even though it could have considerably contributed to thepedagogical outcomes of the Engwiki project.Some other disadvantages of classic wiki technology (see: Elrufaie, 2005) could also apply to theEngwiki project: (a) no possibility to deny the right to modify certain pages – Main Page, pages withdescription assignments, and similar pages that must remain static; (b) no possibility to make astudent page private until the student decides that the content is ready for publication; (c) nopossibility to make the content in a wiki environment visible only to students who are enrolled inparticular courses. The lack of control over published content is another potentially negative aspectof introducing wiki technology in a university environment (for an example, see: Battle, 2006). In thecase of the Engwiki project there were no cases of misuse of wiki for publishing inappropriatecontent, except for a discovery that a malicious web robot had opened a new wiki page andrepeatedly placed inappropriate advertising content on this web page.

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