[OLR] Exercise 6.2: Wiki and Moodle design

A:// What is it about the design of the wiki and Moodle that you liked or disliked?

Having experienced setting up wiki’s for previous learning and teaching subjects I’ve found that wiki’s work well as interactive jumping-off points for students. I like this because it means, to me, that wiki’s can be used to provide enough concrete information for students to draw upon and become informed, but the very nature of the wiki encourages the addition, by students, of their knowledge and understandings as a learning experience progresses. Additionally, I’ve found that wiki’s blur the distinction between classroom and home for students as thinking spaces. Being able to access digital files both at home and at school really encourages students to get involved and ‘do a bit more’ - which obviously I like. Moodles have something of this quality as well. Whilst I’m less experienced with Moodle’s (which our education department uses to create interactive digital learning resources with); I understand that Moodles, like wikis can allow anyone to edit and add content. However, in my experience, Moodles represent a more hierarchical, top-down presentation / task based learning tool that (as I have seen) is created by a teacher as a learning presentation. However like wiki’s, Moodles can also be used as jumping-off points for students (especially with a short.url redirect).

B:// What features do wiki and Moodle have in common and what are the differences?

Well, both wiki’s and Moodles require logins and the knowledge of someone to set them. All of the wiki’s Moodles that I’ve set up have started with very simple, basic interfaces. Easy to navigate but obviously requiring a learning curve to discover their power and extensibility (especially with regard to embedding digital content such as audio or video). A wiki really is a kind of digital scratch-pad-with-permanence tool and it’s clear, from using one, just how good wiki’s can be for capturing classroom knowledge or corporate memory.

A Moodle goes beyond a wiki in as much as it includes wiki functionality as a subset of it’s features (chat, blog, wiki). Wiki’s, perhaps most notably in the case of wikipedia can have an ‘all comers, anyone’s free to edit them’ vibe. In practice I’m not sure if this is a real distinction between the Moodles and wiki’s that I’ve used: both of which have required user accounts to be created. As a teacher I simply can’t create public ‘all access’ wikis.

Perhaps the clearest distinction that I’ve observed between wiki’s and Moodles stems from my earliest reasons for using wiki’s to teach the editing / revision process of writing. Wiki’s can really expose the range of edits and collaborators that have contributed to the construction of a given piece of text (and they allow reversions) in a way that isn’t anywhere as prominent in a Moodle. This really exposes the wiki’s origins as a rapid tool to create collaborative documents with. Moodles have more of a centralised, course management purpose to them.

C:// Is the presence of likeable features also a combination of the design tips for usability, sociability and sustainability, as advocated by Preece and Kim in earlier topics?

Yes, for me, ‘likeable’ features are features that are easy to use and suit the purpose of what I want to do. Potentially this makes both Moodles and Wiki’s extremely likeable because they (depending on the provider) have so many features that make it simple to deal with the changing / interactive / collaborative nature of knowledge in a dynamic and rapid manner. As has been noted, software with good usability supports rapid learning, high skill retention, low error rates and high productivity (Preece et al., 1994). and is consistent, controllable and predictable making it pleasant and effective to use Shneiderman (1998) (in Lazar, J. and Preece, J. (2002) Social Considerations in Online Communities: Usability, Sociability, and Success Factors. In H. van Oostendorp, Cognition in the Digital World. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Mahwah: NJ. (in press)

In practice I find that this means that I, and my students, can use a wiki in a way where the tool doesn’t get in the way of the job at hand. The tool enables our thinking rather than making us do all of our thinking about how to simply use the tool.