4/15/08 - Meet the Presenters: Ed Gehringer explores peer review a la Wiki
Ed Gehringer’s presentation on Evaluation of Wikis through Peer Review will offer new insights on the use of collaborative spaces to enhance student learning. Gehringer believes that wikis will play a larger role in higher education in the next decade and beyond because they enable a cross-fertilization of ideas which allows a class to tackle projects larger than a single individual could attempt. The Expertiza project at North Carolina State University provides an infrastructure for peer review, and allows instructor and students to interact to assess and help students improve their work. Expertiza enables students to use peer review for a variety of purposes, including research of lecture material (for example, finding lecture-related links), annotation of on-line lecture notes, research paper creation, literature reviews, homework problem and machine-scorable question creation, and weekly reviews of student contributions in a seminar course. All of these can be designed as collaborative activities which utilize wikis as collaborative spaces where students can generate content and become highly engaged in their learning process.
For example, students can use electronic peer review to build learning resources. Students select tasks, submit individually designed learning objects or papers, and review work submitted by their peers, and the process of working together helps them learn to improve their skills and each others’ learning experiences. Student-produced learning objects can be built from scratch, or improve upon the work of previous student-produced work.
Gehringer suggests that students in 2020 will be increasingly comfortable with social networking and collaboration as key ingredients in learning tools. Check out his conference presentation to learn more!
