"A New Direction for Education Research
One contribution of this research is to provide a detailed portrait of wiki usage in U.S. K–12 settings, with particular attention to how wikis support 21st-century skill development and potentially exacerbate digital divides. In crafting this portrait from wiki edit histories, we hope that a second contribution is to present an application for new data sources generated by online learning environments. Without leaving our offices, we made observations from continuously recorded, student–teacher interactions occurring across the United States, and from these observations we characterized wiki activity both in depth and at scale.
We suggest several avenues for leveraging these new data. Future research could produce additional large-scale scans examining different wiki providers, Web 2.0 tools, outcome measures, or countries. With this kind of research, researchers could better contextualize the ethnographic and design research that constitutes the core of education technology scholarship. In addition, broad patterns from quantitative content analysis can suggest new avenues for qualitative investigation. For instance, we are intrigued and concerned by our finding that the percentage of wikis created in Title I schools that fail on the first day is twice as high as the percentage of early failures among wikis created in non–Title I schools. Our content analysis will not unravel this puzzle, but teacher interviews and ethnographic approaches could.
Data from online learning environments also have great potential for student assessment (Clarke-Midura & Dede, 2010). In our research, we characterized learning opportunities in wiki communities, and the next logical step would be to use similar analytic methods to track individual student learning. There are no multiple-choice tests that will effectively evaluate students’ abilities to solve ill-structured problems or collaborate with peers. Online learning environments, however, collect continuous data about student performance on such tasks. These data could enable the development of time-efficient, valid assessments of higher order thinking skills. We are optimistic that the earliest forays into this field might rival the efficacy of our current testing systems. For instance, we hypothesize that the number of words that a student writes in secondary school—tracked online—would be a better predictor of college persistence than scores from any contemporary standardized writing assessment. If true, then rather than developing measures of 21st-century skills by devising ever more time-consuming testing regimes (Tamayo, 2010), researchers and policy makers should explore strategies for using real-time, online data sources to measure learning as learners go about their daily activities.
The challenges of realizing the potential of Web 2.0 tools in education are considerable. However, these challenges are paired with new research and assessment opportunities enabled by emerging online learning platforms. Although our research has only touched the surface of these new opportunities, we believe that the analysis of large-scale data sets from online learning environments is one of the most exciting new frontiers of educational research."
Referência
Reich, J., Murnane, R., & Willett, J. (2012). The State of Wiki
Usage in US K–12 Schools Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess
Quality and Equity in Online Learning Environments. Educational Researcher, 41(1), 7-15.
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