Wiki-enhanced social scribing of lectures: A case study in an undergraduate course

We document how Web 2.0 tools such as Wiki can be used to enhance peer to peer learning. As is commonly known, note-taking abilities vary among the students and that bad class notes exacerbates the problem of low comprehension or even wrong understanding of essential concepts. One tempting solution to address this is to hand out instructor notes/slides to the class or to assign students to scribe each lecture, which is then shared with the class, typically through a website. This only offers a partial solution to the problem as the quality of the scribing vary from student to student and the students are essentially given expression of others' understanding. We have found that the wiki is an excellent mechanism to engage the students in a participatory, socially networked, scribing of lectures, to result in a set of comprehensive notes that the whole class helped create. The set of notes generated is greater than the sum of the individual components, and represents the collective understanding of the class.