ABSTRACT
Teachers today increasingly face new opportunities as well as challenges and demands. In their practices they encounter new tools, new infrastructures, new settings, new learning activities, and new perspectives on learning and teaching. In this chapter we examine some of these challenges and how we have tried to respond to them by engaging researchers, teachers, and designers in joint pedagogic, communication and technological designs operationalized in educational use of wikis. Wikis potentially afford collective knowledge advancement in distributed online mode. Participants working in wikis can contribute, edit, delete, comment, and make links to contributions and external resources in order to ideally produce a result greater than the sum of individuals’ input. In many ways, a wiki does not make sense on an individual basis and rests on a collective epistemology. Collective problem solving and knowledge production are often referred to as vital competences in the knowledge society, whether in education (Hargreaves, 2003) and more specifically technology-rich environments (Stahl, 2006) or in working life (Cole, 1999; Hakkarainen et al., 2004).
