elearnspace

We’ve been running wikis in our department at U of Manitoba for three years. The project is very much grassroots – we installed mediawiki and began experimenting. As a result, numerous faculty members have requested additional wiki installs for their classes and research. The question becomes: how do you evaluate the impact of wikis on learning? Or, how do you research the contributions that wikis make to information creation and sharing? Or, for that matter, what would educators be using if they didn’t have access to a hosted wiki and would it be better/worse?
Delft University, running what looks like a similar wiki project to ours, offers a variety of visualizations of wiki activity: edits, co-authorship, article/page connectedness (to other pages). Research of this type is interesting, but fails to get at the bigger questions of impact. What have wikis added that would not have been possible in their absence? Activity and co-authorship are basic metrics, similar to saying “Jane and Bob talked to each other four times during a group project in class”. That’s nice. Now what does it mean? What did that interaction contribute to learning?