Wikis and K12-university partnerships

In spite of the weather, I was glad I attended Saturday's "Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology" at the Penn Stater.

A highlight was a presentation by Dr. Kira Baker-Doyle of Penn State-Berks on the "Wiki Collaboration Project", in which she provided oversight for a partnership between ten elementary education interns from the University and ten classroom teachers in Cornwell Terrace Elementary School.

Kira saw this as a way to demonstrate the concept of the University as "an incubator of civic participation and democracy". For her students, this was an opportunity for service-learning: a way for them to apply their theoretical knowledge with active community involvement.

Hopefully, this project would help these pre-service teachers to develop a network of professional support before they entered the workforce; this would become a resource for their future professional development. (There's a growing recognition that an effective way for teachers to receive meaningful, ongoing professional development is for them to be connected to a diverse body of peers.)

For the university, this was a chance to see "education theory put into practice" and to address the disconnect between emerging research and the practical aspects of what's "on the ground."

It's an opportunity for K-12 schools to "get outside" of their school community and connect to information about emerging trends in the field; to experiment with different ways of delivering curriculum; and for teachers to generate ideas on how technology might be used in their classroom. (Teachers appreciated having a chance to partner with students who were clearly more digitally literate than they were.) For some teachers, it was an opportunity to become familiar with new theories of "21st century literacy".

The students began by observing the classroom, looking for practices that supported literacy. They posted their observations in a "wiki" that was edited by their fellow students, with comments added by the classroom teachers. The importance of "reflection" - the chance to compare notes with others on "what we have learned" - was a common theme throughout the conference.

For many of her students, collaborative writing was a new concept; they struggled with trying to merge different styles, with writing in the third person, and with wanting to maintain authorship/ownership of what they had written.