Wikis in education - After ten years of experience

Abstract

In the recent ten years, the use of Wikimedia projects in classroom has become a daily necessity. On the Wikiversity subject pages, students can enroll into the seminar schedule, teachers can publish links to their educational resources and instructions, as well as summarize experiences. Students can document their activities on their personal Wikiversity pages, where they can also report about their assignments and exchange information with teachers and their peers. They often use Wikiversity as a sandbox, in order to sketch the encyclopedic entries for Wikipedia. They can link Wikiversity with Wikisource. The latter is a space to which they can upload the literary texts that are found in the national digital library. They can also correct the errors, which have been caused by OCR process, and equip the texts with metadata. Wikis thus force their users to depart from the school “ghetto” and enter the realm of their discipline through the participatory establishment of its sustainable, digital infrastructure. Considering the valuable potential that the wikis have in the context of the paradigm shift, during which competition retreats in favor of the participation and exchange, the article concludes that wikis are still insufficiently represented in the education processes.