Wikis, knowledge building communities and authentic pedagogies in pre-service teacher education

Web 2.0 technologies including blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking and a host of new and emerging applications are gaining popularity in classrooms at all levels of education globally. Such technologies are claimed to offer new ways of fostering interaction, community building, content creation and modification and knowledge building in the classroom. However, as with more traditional forms of technology that have been appropriated for the classroom, it is important that Web 2.0 technologies are not just used because they are the latest thing, but that authentic and pedagogically sound contexts are developed for applying these new applications in classrooms. This paper reports on initial attempts to integrate wiki technologies into a pre-service teacher education course as a way of fostering collaborative knowledge building networks within the classroom and to model an authentic way of integrating technology into curriculum. Pre-service teaching students were situated in a rich, problem-based learning scenario, delivered in a blended model of face-to-face and online modes, including wikis. Research into students' responses to the use of the wikis suggests that most students were highly engaged in the environment and that the use of the wiki facilitated group interaction and collaborative learning, but that there needs to be further work in instilling a culture of collaboration and collective knowledge creation to realise the full potential that wikis offer an educational setting.