Exploring science pedagogy on the web 2.0/mobile border: Teachers’ views of a mobile wiki-based inquiry approach

Abstract

This paper reports on teachers’ experiences of a 10-week, wiki-based, predominantly mobile science education intervention for secondary school students. It was designed to shift traditional pedagogical approaches towards more inquiry-based approaches by combining the strengths of wikis and mobile smart devices. The four participating Macau science teachers, with shared responsibility for 250 students, noted greater student engagement and reported some shifts towards more constructivist pedagogy and more active student learning. Evidence emerged of the value of personalization, collaboration, online feedback, and authentic learning, but the lack of mobile optimization of the wiki platform negatively impacted the degree of personalization, collaboration and authenticity. Lessons were learned about the need for educational technology interventions to carefully consider the intersection between software and hardware; the reasons for the recent decline of wikis as educational tools; and the ongoing educational value of web 2.0-style collaboration in our increasingly mobile era