Prior to checking out the Wikis provided in this week’s lesson, I had this idea that Wikis were basically blogs. As I further explored these sites, I realized that Wikis are used not only to archive entries, but more importantly to provide a means of collaborating. Wikis allow students to electronically collect information in order to complete jigsaw projects together in one place. Teachers and curriculum specialists are able to collect information, files, resources, and thoughts about lesson plans. Teachers can also connect with one another from across the world and share experiences or provide support and encouragement.
Monitoring smaller classroom Wikis begins with setting expectations and providing students with exemplary examples prior to ever even allowing students to contribute. Many larger public Wikis, such as Wikipedia, require that credentials are posted in addition to your contribution. Although not everyone who contributes is a professional in every area, each entry can easily be traced back to the author and may reveal some insight as to what they contributed to the Wiki.
As many of you all have already discussed, GoogleDocs is a new(ish) web-based storage and collaboration site. GoogleDocs allows multiple people to access a document at a single time and contribute. I am familiar and in love with GoogleDocs as I have used it for online courses and Teach For America has used it for scheduling and as a checklist for a list of students to monitoring progress. During our lengthy application process and since being accepted into the program, we have used documents on GoogleDocs on which everyone tracks there progress in databases and marks their schedules in order to schedule interviews and such. It is user-friendly, free, and allows collaboration in a similar capacity to Wikis.
-Erika
Dear Erika
I fully agree with you about setting expectations when starting a Wiki. I recall in Sp”09 when a prof wished that her class (Computers as Cognitive Tools) would create a wiki but it was wishful thinking as there was no attempt to guide us into the process, set goals, clarify purpose and scope. Also the wish was not part of the coursework. No one (4 students) responded to that wish as she had kept us more than busy with coursework that counts.
In this class we are given adequate reference sites to kick start the exploration. The Flat Classroom and Google Takes Over the World (2006) project is an interesting and good one (content, layout and research) and especially seeing how Google has permeated into the education.
I like the reference section in larger public wikis and as you pointed out, credentials are important and required for it gives the readers more confidence with the content and allows them to explore further from the sources, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edublog and