1. The Evolution of the Wiki as a Universal Campus Resource
Alessandra Barrera, Christopher Jenkins, Alexandra Kurtz, James Weisel, and Xin Xu.
Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville, GA 30043, USA
Abstract
Georgia Gwinnett College facilitates the building of community among students, faculty, and administration through a campus-wide wiki with over 25,000 pages and 100,000 edits since its inception in The wiki initially supplemented the campus educational platform, but quickly evolved into a tool to facilitate campus-wide interdisciplinary cooperation on learning material and developing study tools, solving complex problems, and completing team projects, as well as student club development and committee work. The information provided will demonstrate the effectiveness of this tool in enhancing teaching, cultivating student learning, and creating a cohesive atmosphere at this new four-year institution.
Examples of Wiki Use on Campus
Information Technology Courses
Faculty members design multimedia projects on wiki, and students publish their completed projects on wiki. To help students getting use to the wiki environment, wiki editing skills are introduced at the beginning of the course. Homework is assigned requiring students to create a wiki page about themselves. Students usually will visit each other’s page. Wiki helps students to know their classmates. It also helps the faculty to know their students sooner. Wiki also provides a platform for GGC students to share their knowledge. Students have created tutorials on wiki, developed their own study guide on wiki, and shared their class notes on wiki. Another use of wiki is to collaborate on group projects. Group members could post the progress of the project on wiki. Instructors could provide immediate feedback and guideline to help the students achieving the best results.
Business Courses
The principles of accounting courses rely on the Wiki primarily to deliver instructor created content and interactive self-assessment quizzes.  In Upper-level courses students are taking greater advantage of the technology by contributing directly to the course content, collaborating on team projects, and collaboratively solving accounting problems.
Biology Courses
The campus wiki site has progressed from a tool to accompany the traditional educational platform to a site utilized by multiple faculty and students to generate a collaborative learning environment. Biology faculty’s utilization of the wiki varies classroom to classroom, including a resource for course requirements, solving case studies or problems, completing group research projects, and student development of chapter reviews and exam study guides. In all applications of the wiki in biology courses, students consistently rank the wiki in the top three course resources that are useful to help achieve academic success, surpassing the course textbook. It ranks as the number one course resource in classrooms using the wiki to develop reviews and exam study guides.
Student Organizations
Students also get involved using the wiki as a place to find people with common interests (GGC Soccer), to collaborate on forming clubs and as a place to disseminate information about their approved clubs. Students who want to start a club can use the wiki to find students that have the same interests. Then, once there are enough potential members, each club before receiving official recognition, must create a constitution and goals consistent with the mission and vision of the College and Student Affairs. Students can and do use the wiki to develop these documents. Finally, once the club is recognized by the Council on Student Organizations (COSO), they can dissemination information about activities, service learning, etc. using their wiki site.
Faculty Committees
The Georgia Gwinnett College Wiki site is also used as a place for faculty to collaborate on documents, grants and teaching ideas. The faculty driven Integrated Educational Experience (IEE) Goal Team focused on the effective use of technology set up a wiki site to collaborate on the definition of their goal as well as assessment measures. Each member was able to edit and add to the working documents easily to create the complete learning model for that IEE goal. In addition, there is a large group of interdisciplinary faculty working to submit an NSF grant. A wiki page has been set up for the collaboration of ideas over the summer term.
Structure of Course Sample Student Meeting Records
GGC Wiki by the Numbers
167
Faculty
2947
Students
31963
Pages
138377
Edits 40
Average edits/person 10 34
Linked faculty pages 41
Linked course pages 16
Linked student organizations 3
Years old (started in 2007) 1
Campus wide shared wiki
<0.002%
Pages reported vandalized
Interactive Learning using the Wiki Quiz Module
How We Made GGC Wiki Safe, Usable & Widespread
Faculty Provided Initial Support
Front page layout/menus
Example course pages
Example faculty pages
Training sessions by wiki users who are faculty
Provide Simple Access Control
Everyone can read
Only account holders edit
No one can delete except wiki administrators
Log all activity
Lesson Objectives Course requirements
Future Directions of GGC Wiki
WYSIWYG Interface, not wiki tags (WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get)
More students with computers in classroom
Support for concurrent editing & note taking
Enable more MediaWiki extensions, update software
Further study usage patterns in faculty/students
Grow toward supporting 10,000 students
Student Organizations
Faculty Committees