Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning
(pages 28-51)
Chapter 4: Wikis: Easy Collaboration for All (Richardson)
Chapter 5: RSS: The New Killer App for Education (Richardson)
This fellow below has some good words on why a wiki might do just the trick to develop more learner centered and active classrooms.
This week we are going to create a wiki using Wikispaces. Click here (http://www.wikispaces.com/site/tour#introduction) for a detailed video tutorial on how to create wiki. The goal here is to create a wiki that has content on it related to an area you teach in or a subject matter you are familiar with. This is only a start to the wiki, it can continue to evolve as the class progresses and you add content. Remember, like Wikipedia, the idea in creating a wiki is that others (students) can visit your wiki and add information to each page. If the wiki is on the best math tricks for basic math, you might have a home page that describes the purpose of the wiki, and the pages of the wiki might be broken into addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The people who are to add content to your wiki might add their own personal tricks in one or more of those areas.
ASSIGNMENTS
The wiki you create should have the following:
- At least four pages including the home page;
- Each page should have some text related to the tile of the page;
- Add at least one video from YouTube or Google Video, or some other video site.
Here is a great wiki (http://web2tutorial.wikispaces.com) on web 2.0 content and it is a Wikispaces wiki. Take a look and see what can be done.
In your class blog (blogspot.com), write a blog post that reflects on how you might include the wiki you made into your class. What would the purpose be? What sort of content might it have? What would the expectations be of your students for contributions to the wiki?
You can add a link from the blog post to your wiki so that classmates can see how it is progressing and add comments as you begin to develop it.
What are the challenges we face when allowing students to contribute to a single editable webpage? What are the benefits? Do you believe they outweigh the challenges? Include your thoughts to these question in a blog post.
During week 2, you went hunting for some great educational blog sites. We've generated a list through the discussion board that encompasses a wealth of knowledge. This week, you should go hunting for some great wiki lesson plans that instructors are using in their classrooms. (Please don't use Wikipedia a reference.) You might start with a simple Google search for wiki lesson plans. As with the blogs, the goal for this discussion is to create a variety of resources on different topics that you could easily modify in your own courses. You should find 2 wiki lesson plans. Please provide the URL and a brief summary of the topic/lesson being developed and include these in a blog post.
