View source for Wikichem:Wikis in education

This page outlines some of the ways to use wikis in chemical education.  (Needs cleanup)

A lot depends on how you want to use a wiki - it's a lot broader than a podcast or an RSS feed - imagine asking someone in 1994, "I want to use the World Wide Web in my teaching" and you have the idea.  

==Wikis as resources==

You can use wikis as resources - many students already do use Wikipedia, etc.  In this sense you're just using them as you would any other website, except that wikis have their own quirks which make them less reliable (though still very valuable) but much more "alive". 

==Wikis as organisational infrastructure==

Another approach is to use a wiki as infrastructure within a course.  This only works for a class that is quite "virtual" in nature.  A leading figure with this type of approach is Jean-Claude Bradley.  He has all his classes organised via a wiki, with links to podcasts, blogs, resources, etc. Here are some of his pages
*[http://edufrag.wikispaces.com/ Chemistry games]
*[http://collegeenglish.wikispaces.com/tools]
*[http://collegeenglish.wikispaces.com/TeachingToolkits]

A few researchers are starting to use wikis as a internal website for their research group to write up mini-reports on their progress.

==Wikis as teaching tools==

This is still quite experimental, we're still learning how to do this best.  Here are some ideas:
1. I am having my advanced organic chemistry students write up their "paper" for presentation on a wiki - this is similar to what I've done in the past with posting papers on the web, except this time the students can do it all themselves.  
2. Tom Rauchfuss (my co-presenter), teaches inorganic chemistry at the University of Illinois, and he has students write or improve a Wikipedia article on an inorganic compound as a student project.  This works well because Tom cleans up any mess made by his students, but generally they do a good job.
3. Henry Rzepa at Imperial College did a similar thing on an internal wiki, where students were allowed to collaborate on one or more projects, however they wanted to.  The results were very interesting, he found that all 90 or so students participated, and some even started writing templates for data tables and the like!  See his results at [http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/talks/acs07/]
4. Others have used wikis as tools in Webquests in high school & middle school education.  I heard an interesting talk by an Icelandic speaker at the 2006 "Wikimania" conference, 
[http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:SG1]
[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Life_in_the_open_ocean/Webquests]
I also included the main Webquest site. 

==Culture==

One final thing.  Wikis usually have their a very open culture, which is not to everyone's tastes.  If you like to keep a really firm grip on things, then a wiki is probably going to drive you crazy!  I'm not talking about bad language etc, you can usually deal with cases of that (and we have tools for that we can borrow from Wikipedia).  What I mean is that students may want to change the direction of the project, etc.  If you're happy to let things evolve, and you're open to differing viewpoints, then a wiki will work for you.

[[Category:Chemical Education]]