Wikis and Blogs? What role do they play in learning?

We held our weekly ScholarLab team meeting today. Most of our meetings are intended to make sense of the daily overload of information and noise in our very crowded
elearning industry. Today’s meeting was no exception. We chose to discuss the sometimes misunderstood role of wikis and blogs in online learning. This topic was chosen because one of my team members recently returned from a group discussion. The focus of the meeting was integrating wikis and blogs into the online learning environment. He mentioned that the well attended meeting lasted for about two hours with many ‘learning experts’ in attendance. Most of the attendees were adamant that wikis, blogs and other learning 2.0 tools are vital for today’s net generation learners. He questioned some members of the group about their organization’s learning culture, vision, strategy…What he observed was that many rightly saw these tools as a way for learners to collaborate with each other; however their use was not always linked to a specific organizational learning vision or objective.


I generally agree that the way we learn is rapidly changing and tools like wikis and blogs are helping to shape the way we learn. However, like all learning tools, the use of wikis and blogs in a learning environment should be clearly linked to learning objectives. For example, as part of a course, a blog or wiki can we used to complete a specific project, to brainstorm ideas throughout a course, as a reference point for research and documentation and much more. We should always keep in mind that wikis and blogs are merely tools to engage learners and to offer opportunities for creativity and free thinking. They are not in and of themselves the learning experience and therefore their use in an online learning environment should be linked to some form of learning objective.