Jan 21 2011
Wikis in the Classroom
Yesterday afternoon, we had a class on Wiki Adventures, and in case you missed it, here’s the handout for the class, on our wiki.
This past week I also had the opportunity to attend our Region 1 Learning Series Event for Twenty-First Century Skills. The speaker was Cathleen Richardson, an Apple Distinguished Educator who hails from Georgia. She was a fast talker and mover, sending her energy into the room. This energy hit us in the form of many ideas and examples of technology use available in education today. She impressed folks with her demonstration of QR Codes and augmented reality apps on the iPhone. And she did slow down long enough to tell us the virtues of wikis. You can find many of her resources she shared online on her own… (you guessed it!) wiki!
And then this morning, I came across this resource, some sage advice on 10 best practices for using wikis in the classroom from Barbara Schroeder.
And here’s the important thing that I shared with our workshop participants last afternoon.
- Our concept of a document is grounded in a printed page. These are typically formal.
- Word processors make documents, but by in large, these tools are designed to make printed pages.
- Writing and printing “documents” are not mutually exclusive.
- The original web browser from Tim Berners-Lee was called Web and was designed to be read and write. As it turned out, by the time we all got to it, it was pretty much read only.
- The terms “Read/Write Web” and “Web 2.0″ both collectively refer to the malleability of web pages today. The best examples? Blogs, wikis, and collaborative applications (think Google Apps).
- Wikis were designed from the beginning (by Ward Cunningham, in case you’re wondering) to be online. There was never any intent to print them. They like living in flux, with the capability of changing whenever we need them to.
Let me know if I can help you learn with your students in the wikiverse.
