Educational Technology Blog

Wiki Principles

December 22nd, 2011

I have been teaching a course on Wikis in Higher Education and have found Dave Foord’s STOLEN principles to be very useful. In the wiki spirit, he even provides a wiki where the STOLEN principles can be edited.  To summarise

S – Specify Overall objective. The wiki must have a clear goal understood by all. If it is to be assessed, there should be guidelines
T – Timely. There should be a clear end-point for activities with intermediate deadlines for activities
O – Ownership. The class should feel that the wiki is theirs and that they are free to edit contributions. (The first time I edited a wiki entry I felt a bit uncomfortable – like I was correcting someone else’s work without their approval)
L – Localised objectives – guidelines as to how to structure wiki and how contributions are to be made. Give examples.
E – Engagement rules – who can edit what and when. Guidelines for acceptable usage.
N – Navigation structure

The ‘L’ should perhaps be a ‘G’ for guidelines  or ‘S’ for scaffold but of course STOGEN or STOSEN are not English words.

Based on my own experience, I have added Practice, Feedback and Evaluation to come up with:

P – Practice – wiki literacy. Get used to using the wiki
O - Objective – clear task and objectives
S – Scaffold – help users both to work collaboratively and use the wiki tool
T – Time – deadlines and end-point
E – Evaluate & Feedback – Ongoing feedback to help students.  Evaluate at end
R – Reflect  - On student performance and use of wiki

Ownership which I think is important is included under Scaffold. Ongoing Feedback is included under Evaluate which is a bit of a kludge. Suggestions for improvements welcome.

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