Stability and Usability

This vector explains how Google Wave and Wikis can be used in education and what information teachers should learn before they practice Google Wave and Wikis. The advantages and disadvantages are summarized and analyzed in this section, which are helpful for instructors and investors to comprehensively know their stability and usability.

Application of social technology

Nowadays, educators utilize Wikis and Google Wave as educational tools in teaching practices in a variety of ways. Here are some examples of using these social networking.

Wikis

In Michele Notari’s (2006) research on Wikis usage in education, Wiki is being used to design a number of courses by an appropriate “Script”, which leads students’ activities. Instructors utilize a Wiki as a platform to create various teaching activities that can offer students with chances to compare, comment, and evaluate each other’s inputs(Notari, 2006). Michele (2006)proposes that a Wiki is a powerful teaching tool for the Constructivism-basedlearning because it facilitates collaboration(Notari, 2006). As a significant parameter for learning efficiency, collaboration in Wikis allows students to construct their knowledge scaffold in a technology-based learning environment.

Maged N. Kamel Boulos (2006) reports on a collaborative effort in which students in a clinic program collaborate to enhance students', clinicians' and patients' learning experiences(Maged N. Kamel Boulos, 2006). The program used Wiki for two major purposes; one is for obtaining information and knowledge; the other one is as a method of virtual collaboration, such as sharing information among students in group projects. Peter Duffyand Dr Axel Bruns (2006) summarize six potential educational uses of a wiki. A wiki can be used to develop research projects; students can utilize a wiki to reinforce their thoughts from the prescribed readings; tutors can publish course resources by using a wiki in distance education; a map concept can be created by a wiki as well; a Wiki can replace conventional software for facilitating a presentation(Peter Duffy, 2006). Kevin (2007) further developed additional uses of a Wiki, and he states a Wiki can be also used to manage user requirements, project tracking, test case, and user documentation(Kevin R. Parker, 2007).

Google Wave

The official homepage of Google Wave (2010) introduces its four major functions that involve education, creative collaboration, organizations and conferences, and journalism (Google, 2010a). The website also provides two examples that prove Google Wave can be used in a variety of courses, such as language courses, computer science courses, and some literature courses. Moreover, the Google Wave has a number of productivity tools that can manage tasks, poll a group, pick a date, support an idea, and build a mindmap. On the whole, “A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.(Google, 2010b)”

Jeffrey Cheng and his colleagues (2010) combine Google Wave’s functionalities with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) in order to see the possibility of enhancing the ICDL book reading experience by using Google Wave(Jeffrey Cheng, 2009). They present the extension of functionality that they use in ICDL is practical and implemental. However, there are still some challenges during using Google Wave in program. First, instructors feel difficult to design the course because they are not familiar with Google Wave source code. Next, the program cannot take advantage of the collaborative learning environment because of time restrains.

19 potential educational uses for Google Wave

Joel (2009) proposes 19 educational uses for Google Wave in his article that is issued in SoYouWantToTeach website. The 19 potential educational uses include:

1. Curriculum planning 2. Departmental communications 3. Intercampus 4. Plan parent conferences with multiple teachers and multiple schedules 5. Share links to web resources 6. Campus improvement planning 7. Schoolwide calendar/scheduling 8. Faculty meeting follow-up 9. Teacher appraisal sign-ups 10. To-do lists 11. Keep information current between work, cell, and home 12. School newspaper/newsletter article development13. Local newspaper publicity article development 14. Twitter-like communication between faculty without the Twitter-like time drain 15. Share lesson plans with substitutes/administrators/department chairs/other teachers 16. Collaborative book study 17. Group blogging 18. List of music educators 19. Storing favorite web resources in one central searchable location

The original resource can be found at http://www.soyouwanttoteach.com/the-power-of-potential-19-educational-uses-for-google-wave/

Ben Parr presents some ideas for how Wave could be used in customer support in his article, Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web, at Mashable site.

- Sending trouble tickets

- Incident tracking can be a wave

- Call center analytics gadget

- Distribution list gadget

- Customer meta-data gadget

- Surveys can be a wave

The original resource can be found at http://mashable.com/2009/09/05/google-wave-ideas/

Advantages and Disadvantages

As a researcher/instructor, it is very necessary to know what the advantages/disadvantages are in using Google Wave or Wikis in education before he or she uses them in practices.

Advantages

Peter (2006) presents three educational benefits of Wikis in his research. First, a Wiki essentially offers students an online space for collaborative activities in order to construct their knowledge scaffold even though the website’s creator in Wiki does not have prior knowledge or skill in HTML programming (Notari, 2006; Peter Duffy, 2006). Furthermore, learners can develop their skills through building up a Wiki. Finally, a wiki allow a document to be evolving, which can help teachers and students to continually see comments, evolutions, and improvements. Maged (2006) proposes two more advantages of using Wikis in education, which are ease of use and the availability of many open source or free/low-cost software. Google Wave, as a new web-based computing platform, provides a powerful functionality that can be satisfied with most teachers’ and learners’ demands.

Disadvantages

In Kevin’s (2007) article, he summarizes Wang and Turner (2004) and Elrufaie and Turner’s (2005) points about problems of using traditional Wiki paradigm in the classroom, which include: all content is public and modifiable by any users; simultaneous edits are not successful; some Wikis cannot be frozen after a class ends (Chien-min Wang, 2004; Elharith Elrufaie, 2005; Kevin R. Parker, 2007). These problems may bring instructors a lot of inconvenience in their classes. Sometimes, it is very hard for instructors to organize and control their classes in a Wiki-based learning course because a Wiki does not provide all functions that instructors need, such as restriction of modifiability. Moreover, in some situations, instructors cannot easily design their courses because most current instructors are unfamiliar with source code of Google Wave and Wikis. Finally, in distance education, time restraints often restrict collaborative learning activities.

This 2:09 minute YouTube video gives a discussion about using a wiki for process documentation.

Original video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb9nCOCSvR8.

This 1:00:34 minute YouTube video is presented by GoogleDevelopers; the video comprehensively introduces the Google Wave products and many kinds of interactivity that can be offered by Google Wave.

Original video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOFzWZrsPV0

Suggests for Improvement

Here are some suggestions for improving Wiki’s/ Google Wave’s ability in education.

Wikis

1. A wiki had better have the ability of making individual pages on a wiki private in order to protect individual students’ privacy. Moreover, this ability also prevents students from reading contents before they are ready to read.

2. A free school page can be offered in a Wiki. A school’s administrators have the right to edit information in their school zone.

3. A Wiki’s source code should be totally instructed and opened. An online tutorial for editing Wikis should be available on Wiki’s homepage in order to ensure all instructors can easily seize a Wiki’s functionality.

Google Wave

1. A particular vision of Wave should be available for instructors and instructional researchers. The specific vision can make instructors easily focus on course design and organizations; some functions can be only provided by this educational vision, such as students’ privacy protector and course control system.

2. The Google should provide a space that can be only used for educational purpose. An online learning community can be built in this space so that time restraints for collaborations can be reduced.

What should teachers do?

The following segment will explain what problems teachers are getting into if they would like to adopt these social networking for learning.

- Know what demands are

Teachers should know the purpose of using this technology for teaching before the technology is introduced into their classes. That means teachers should take advantage of social networking’s benefits in order to improve their teaching practices. Essentially there are at least three basic educational models that include training programs, K-12 classes, and higher education. These three models have different requirements, which should be carefully analyzed and concerned by teachers. Once teachers decide to use a social networking in their classes, teachers should deeply consider how to utilize a social networking’s advantages and avoid its disadvantages to satisfy their classes’ requirements. One of central questions that teachers should think about is how teachers combine instructional theories, technologies, and teaching practices. For example, teachers can choose either project-based learning or problem-based learning to guide their course design and use a social networking as a platform. On the whole, whether or not to use this technology depends on all that classes’ requirements are.

- Learn products

If instructors make a decision on using this technology in their classes, they should primarily learn the product they are going to use. Different social networking products have various functionalities so that instructors had better comprehensively know what a product can do and what it cannot do. This segment will use Google Wave and Wikis as an example to explain the significance of knowing products. Google Wave is designed more humanistic than Wikis so that K-12 classes may prefer Google Wave to Wikis as their teaching tool. Instead, Wikis is popular in higher education because of its professional framework and usability of constructing knowledge. Moreover, Wikis users need to know some knowledge about source code in order to edit in Wikis, which might be a problem in K-12 level education.

- Implementation

In this section, instructors should clearly know what instructional theories and teaching models they are processing in this technology-based learning environment. The course design is a challenge for most instructors because there are few resources can be used as a reference so far. On the Internet, there are some websites that focus on e-learning can give instructors a variety of ideas for their teaching, such as Mashable.com.

- Reflection and measurement

Since social networking in education is a new raising realm, a lot of instabilities are remaining, such as software’s bugs and privacy protector. As an instructor, he/she should submit a bug report to the developers in order to fix defects as soon as possible. Furthermore, students’ reflections are very important to course improvements, which need instructors summarize and analyze. Measurement is another mission for instructors, which checks if this teaching approach improves teaching quality.

Report Card Rating

Wikis get a high A in this vector because of its brilliant stability and usability in teaching practices. There are a large number of examples of using Wikis as a teaching tool that are shared on the Internet. Constructivismcan be widely utilized in this platform.

Google Wave gets a B in this vector because it has a complicated operational system that is not easy for some learners to learn, although it has a comprehensive function. Instructors and learners have to spend more time and energy on figuring out system before they process learning activities in this learning environment.

Vector 3 Activity - Discussion question

Will Google Wave make students lazy?

Google Wave can make students collaborate in real-time, but it can also make a number of lazy students get by easily. What do you think of this problem?

External Resources and References

Chien-min Wang, D. T. (2004). Extending the Wiki paradigm for use in the classroom. Paper presented at the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC 2004), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA:April 5-7.

Christyinsdesign. (2009). Why a Wiki.

Elharith Elrufaie, D. A. T. (2005). A Wiki paradigm for use in IT courses. Paper presented at the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC'05), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: April 4-6.

Google. (2010a). How people are using Google Wave. from http://wave.google.com/using-wave.html

Google. (2010b). What is Google Wave. from http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

GoogleDevelopers. (2009). Google I/O 2009 - Google Wave: Under the hood In D. D. Casey Whitelaw, Alex Mah, David Wang (Ed.).

Jeffrey Cheng, L. H., Tandeep Sidhu, Nicole Thomas. (2009). Google Wave ICDL social reader - extending the functionality of the international children's digital library social reader on Google Wave. from http://www.leshellhatley.com/cmsc434/termProject/docs/ICDLSocialReader-FinalReport.pdf

Joel. (2009). The Power of Potential: 19 Educational Uses for Google Wave from http://www.soyouwanttoteach.com/the-power-of-potential-19-educational-uses-for-google-wave/

Kevin R. Parker, J. T. C. (2007). Wiki as a teaching tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3, 58-72.

Maged N. Kamel Boulos, I. M., Steve Wheeler. (2006). Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. MBC Medical Education, 6(41).

Notari, M. (2006). How to use a Wiki in education: 'Wiki based effective constructive learning'. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Wikis.

Parr, B. (2009). Google Wave: 5 ways it could change the Web. from http://mashable.com/2009/09/05/google-wave-ideas/

Peter Duffy, A. B. (2006). The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities. Paper presented at the Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006.