For the first discussion post, we read from the West text the chapters on creating wikis for education. We were to discuss the possible pitfalls of using wikis for education. It seems to me that all of the pitfalls mentioned can be avoided through scrupulous planning and design of the wiki and preparation of the learners. The West book has excellent advice for each of those requirements.
For the second discussion post, we read from the West book again in the chapters relating to three main types of educational wikis for: Knowledge Construction, Critical Thinking, and Contextual Application. For each category of wiki, eight ideas for wikis were described (for example, under wikis for Knowledge Construction, development of a Historical Timeline wiki was explained). The assignment was to describe a wiki we might design in each of the three categories, choosing one to use as our larger project in this course.
The Learning Activities for this week were setting up a blog, a Tweeting account, and a wiki. The wiki created will incorporate the idea chosen in the second post for the wiki assignment. Very confused as to this assignment as I do not see any reference to its completion/due date/ scoring, etc. beyond the task to choose one and these words in the Week 2 instructions, "Once your wiki is created, you will start developing a learning activity that takes full advantage of the wiki capability. It's completion will be in Week 4." The Week 4 Overview does not mention this at all, not even in the "point value" section. Clear as mud! It seems that we are destined to muddle through these assignments without enlightenment. I feel like Grasshopper asking, "Is this a test, Master?"
As for what I actually learned this week...
Wikis are far more than I realized. They take blogging a giant step onward from publishing into collaboration and collaborative publishing. After reading the statistics in the Richardson text, my respect for Wikipedia rose prodigiously. Especially telling is this quote from Richardson (2009, p. 56), "So when mistakes occur or vandals strike, the collaborative efforts of the group set it straight, usually very quickly. University of Buffalo Professor Alex Halavais tested this by creating thirteen errors on various posts on Wikipedia, all of which were fixed within a couple of hours (Halavais 2004)."
I was delighted to finally be able to master uploading some of my Word documents to my blog. It was very easy to get started on Twitter and fascinating to start the Wiki. I will be doing a wiki assignment for a theoretical high school APEnglish class to create stories with each small group working in a different genre. There is a lot of work to be done there. I was pretty tickled when I managed to make a few pages and make them link back to the home page. That was such a nightmare eight or nine years ago when I first created a webpage for a graduate class at Mt. St Mary's. Each page was about fifteen steps back then. This is incredibly simple by comparison.
I signed up to take the PBWorks webinar next Wednesday on wiki development basics. I didn't see any clear and easy way to build a sidebar on the page. Hoping to learn that and other button tips. Need to work on content as well. If Moodle is truly free (as I have heard), I might try to find a way to have a discussion thread in the wiki project.
The two texts for the class are:
West, James A. & West, Margaret L. (2009). Using Wikis for Online Collaboration: the Power of the Read-Write Web by James West and Margaret West. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.
