Building a learning community using wikis in educational technology courses Swapna Kumar Department of Curriculum and Teaching School of Education Boston University USA swapnac@bu.edu Abstract: Wikis are increasingly being used to enhance and facilitate collaborative learning in higher education. This paper describes the use of a wiki in an educational technology course to build community and collaboration among educators beyond the classroom and course duration. Feedback from participants at the end of the educational technology course highlighted the potential of wikis for encouraging collaboration, sharing, and reflection by teachers about their technology use in educational environments. Quantitative and qualitative data about participant educators’ continued use of the wiki and their sense of community will be collected three months after the end of the course. Introduction A number of Web 2.0 tools – wikis, blogs, social networking tools like Facebook, and social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us provide educators with increased opportunities to use technology for collaboration and community-building. Unlike older websites where teachers or instructors provided content online for students to view and use, new technologies make it possible for educators to create online space where students can be contributors and creators of content. Such virtual spaces can also be used by students not only during a course but also after it ends. This paper describes how wikis were used in a graduate educational technology course for in- service educators to facilitate community-building and collaboration during the course as well as after it ended. Participants’ qualitative feedback on the ways in which the wiki contributed to building a community among the course participants during the course is reported in this paper. Participants’ contributions to the wiki during and after the course are being tracked and a survey about their sense of community due to wiki use will be administered three months after the end of the course. Using Wikis in Education A ‘wiki’ has been defined as “a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information – a database, where each page is easily edited by any user with a forms- capable Web browser client” (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001, p14). Wikis are easy to use – users can create, add, edit, and change content and pages in a wiki. This has caught the imagination of educators who encourage and implement constructivist and/or collaborative learning with their students. “Even confirmed technophobes have grasped and mastered the system quickly…Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure” (Lamb, 2004, p40). A number of wiki creation tools (e.g. http://www.wetpaint.com , http://www.mediawiki.com ; http://www.pbwiki.com ) are available online for use by teachers and students free of cost. All wikis contain basic editing functions (e.g. text, images, tables, lists, hyperlinks), tracking functions (saving of modifications), linking functions (links to pages and articles), and search functions (text search of wikis) (Ebersbach, Glaser & Heigl, 2006). The ease of use or the transparency of the interface, the capability of creating hyperlinks, the use of the discussion area for reflection, and the ability to track prior changes are just some features that make wikis attractive to educators (Achtermann, 2006).