Disclaimer:
Having never contributed to a wiki before, I can say with
the utmost confidence that I can fix them ;)
Abstract:
Student participation is the final mile in implementing any
type of constructivist or communicative activity. As wikis
become more and more used by teachers and schools,
and
fit nicely with a constructivist approach, I felt that just
expecting kids to "know" how to use a wiki or going
through the very laborious and teacher transmission
focused tutorial on how to use a wiki would be ineffective
and probably prevent students from using them. So why
not set up a wiki like a game?
The idea would be to build good practices that promote the
use of a wiki. Here are some proposals which are markers
in this meme. The student or user needs to participate in
order to unlock different abilities which then in turn unlock
more abilities and ultimately lead to a measurement of
"trust" on the part of that account user. The economy of
this wiki game could/would be: letters contributed/Time
spent lurking.
Here are some possible examples of this theme.
(1) *look before you leap* After signing in and logging on,
students need to click through n number of wiki pages to
unlock the ability to edit. (the wiki counts the number of
pages viewed by the user and continues to keep these
statistics for later trustworthiness.
(2) *a picture is worth a thousand words* After the user
contributes 1K characters/words, uploading pictures to the
wiki is unlocked.
(3) *giving credit where credit is due* citing n sources
unlocks the embedding of video.
(4) *stubborn as a mule* have a sentence on a wiki persist
through n time unlocks hyperlinking
You get the idea...