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Magic with Moodle

Using wikis to create a student knowledge hub

Peter Kirwan

School of English

04/28/23 Learning Technology Section

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Background

• Shakespeare and Jonson (Q33601 UK) (SPR 12-13)• Wanted to extend classroom conversation• Use an environment genuinely collaborative

& owned by students, but also intersects withthe live experience of the classroom andlocates in the wider context

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Background

“We are entering the end of a period of relative textual stability and that when Gutenberg invented the printing press we replaced a culture of primarily oral transmission / scribal transmission with fixity printed texts. Digital media is reversing that, taking us back into a culture where people were more inclined to scribble, to compile, create multiple kinds of texts, none of which has more authority than others.”Peter Kirwan

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What did you do?• Use wikis to replicate the “commonplace book” – personal

log of experiences - owned by individuals but shared• Like a commonplace book a wiki does not need to be

authoritative (don’t cite Wikipedia!)• Students become experts in a particular contextual area of

the course, log ideas and share them at an early stage• Two classes of 20 students: two in each class given a

research specialism, e.g., the Globe, Shakespeare’s life • All students have access to all the wikis, with the ‘experts’

taking responsibility for editing a particular one

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What did you do?• Given starting

suggestions• Contribute to specific

seminar sessions• Week by week

put together wikis online, creating a digital commonplace book

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How it worked

• This level of research used to be at the end of the module when preparing their individual essays

• The wikis contributed to the research questions for their individual essays

• Wiki was a third space where students in different seminar groups collaborated

• Built collaborative research base much broader than any of them would have been able to achieve individually. 

• Peter could pick up on them in class, to introduce the kind of work they’d been doing

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Copyright Yating Zhang 2013

• The alchemy example shows pages representing several thousand words’ worth of writing.

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The students could:• pool their resources• parcel out work• create collaboratively• go off and write very different individual essays• take ownership of their learning (finding out things even

Peter didn’t know about)

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The impact on students:• More firsts than ever before!• Removed anxiety about writing up to the correct standard• Could take initial notes and readings and share “raw”

before  needing to have extensive distillation of it• Freedom to practice writing in a more informal context• Could identify their specialisation• Build on rich shared foundation of knowledge• They were writing worth something from day 1 not just an

essay only seen by them and their marker

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Further informationMoodle Help•How to add a wiki

Video•Peter Kirwan talking about the wikis•https://workspace.nottingham.ac.uk/display/Moodlehelp/Magic+with+Moodle+-+Using+wikis+to+create+a+student+knowledge+hub

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Thank you for listening

Learning Team Support

learning-team-support@nottingham.ac.uk

Blog: bit.ly/ltnottingham

Moodle Help: bit.ly/uonmoodlehelp

(or search Workspace for “Moodle help”)

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