In piazza online: exploring the use of wikis with beginner foreign language learners

Abstract

Wikis are increasingly seen as useful tools for promoting active student engagement and collaborative language learning. Unlike most applications of wikis to foreign/second language learning thus far reported on, ours concerns complete beginners. In this paper, we focus on our approach to and evaluation of the integration of wikis into our first-year Italian course with the aim of encouraging out-of-class practice and fostering students’ sense of class community, right from the start of their learning. The evaluation showed that, although the students created several attractive and interesting pages, they did not appreciate the wikis as much as we had hoped: there were technical hitches, many found collaboration dynamics challenging, and most developed little interest in participating in a cross-campus online group. Our data analysis found no relationship between the students’ perceptions of the wiki work and their gender, initial confidence or frequency of use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools. However, those who, on entering the course, placed greater importance on interaction with other students, and a sense of community in class, showed greater appreciation of the wiki experience. From these findings, we draw implications for improving our approach to integrating wiki work into our program.

Keywords:

• wiki
• computer-mediated communication
• beginners
• sense of community
• Italian
• out-of-class practice

Acknowledgements

The design of the wiki trial was conducted together with Sara Visocnik Murray, and the implementation with Sara and Bernadine Leon, with technical assistance from Catherine Hodgson. We are also very grateful to Dr Bill Metcalf, and two anonymous reviewers, for very useful feedback on a previous draft of the paper. Claire Kennedy is partly funded by the Fondazione Cassamarca in Treviso, Italy, through the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies.

Notes

1. In this paper, we use ‘Web 2.0’ to refer to online tools which facilitate collaborative creation and sharing of material between users, such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites. We use ‘computer-mediated communication’ (CMC) to refer to all electronic tools which enable users to communicate across time and space.

2. We acknowledge the risk that students’ answers may be influenced by awareness that a survey is not completely anonymous. However, we sought to minimise this by phrasing the questions in such a way as to avoid a sense of confrontation or of encouragement to please us, and by absenting ourselves from class while the questionnaires were completed and a delegated student collected and boxed them.

3. We claim only face validity for the questionnaires, in that they addressed what we aimed to study: the students’ perceptions of the value of the wiki experience to them, and possible relationships between those perceptions and certain characteristics of the learners.

4. Specifically, the students’ responses on their overall rating of the wikis were collapsed into the categories ‘very good or good’, ‘undecided’ and ‘poor or very poor’. Their assessments on each of the five specific statements on the wikis were collapsed into the categories ‘strongly agree or agree’, ‘undecided’ and ‘disagree or strongly disagree’. Their levels of confidence about the wiki work beforehand were collapsed into the categories ‘very or fairly confident’ and ‘not confident or very unconfident’, and their responses on the importance of each of the four factors for achievement collapsed into the categories ‘very important or important’ and ‘of minor importance or not important at all’. For cross-tabulations by gender in particular, the answers on the five specific assessments of the wikis had to be further collapsed to two categories, pooling the ‘undecided’ with those who agreed. The collapsing of the wiki assessment variables into two categories for this purpose meant that the cross-tabulations by gender produced a 2-by-2 table and it was necessary to observe the ‘continuity correction’ value and its significance level instead of the Pearson chi-square value and its significance level.

5. A future, follow-up study – in relation to an enhanced approach to integrating wikis informed by the results of the current investigation – might benefit from using mixed methods and collecting data through the face-to-face methods of focus groups and/or semi-structured interviews, but such types of qualitative data were not warranted for this first study. In any case, the general nature of the open questions (e.g. ‘Please briefly describe any particularly positive or negative experiences you had in the collaborative group tasks using the piazza wikis’) allowed the students to elaborate on their perceptions to a considerable extent in the questionnaires.

6. Given the manageably small amount of textual data – each of the 79 students provided responses to at most a handful of open questions, usually in fewer than 20 words each – it was not necessary to use NVivo or similar software to organise or process these data.

7. Precise information on degree programs was not available for exchange students and cross-institutionally enrolled students. The percentages given are therefore percentages out of those for whom the degree program was known.

8. The university's standard online ‘Student evaluation of course’ survey gave similar results for this course to those in previous years, with mean responses to the key statement ‘Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of this course’ ranging from 4.3 to 4.5 (with maximum possible 5) on the three campuses, which placed it well within the ‘High’ bracket of comparably sized courses across the university.

9. Despite the consolidation of categories for these variables, a small number of the cross-tabulations did not permit valid chi-square tests because too few students were represented in some cells of the tables, and the ‘minimum expected cell frequency’ assumption was therefore violated.