It's funny how internet related lingo invades our daily lives. "Google It" and "Wiki It" have become everyday phrases. Certainly, the availability of information is a wonderful thing, but I feel as though our students have become too reliant on wiki (wikipedia in specific) for information and are missing the point of the read/write web. My students tend to use wikipedia as a reference source, oftentimes without regard for the fact that it is open to editing by anyone and may not be 100% reliable.
I think that one of the most advantageous uses of the wiki technology is for teaching writing. I can see excellent opportunities for students to compose and peer edit, tracking changes and really thinking about the writing process. Too often students are asked to compose in a vacuum, when the reality is that most of us ask for help or editing from a peer before we have to "publish" something. Wikis would facilitate this process by making each student's work easily accessible to other students. And with the ability to track changes the students and the teacher could see where the advice is coming from. My one big concern with doing this is that it would become a logistical assessment nightmare! How do you assess teh quality of peer revision on a wiki? I suppose it's not that much more difficult than doing so with handwritten peer revision, but it seems daunting, all the same.
3 comments:
Carrie,
Another problem with wikis is how to allow the students to make changes to the wiki. Glenda & I used pbwiki.com to create our wiki (http://bookwomen.pbwiki.com/), but with a free wiki, we only get one password. If we decided to give out the password to the students so that they could post directly to the wiki, they could add pages, delete pages, do anything to the wiki but delete the wiki itself. In order to get different levels of passwords, such as contributor, administrator, etc., we would have to upgrade to a pbwiki account that is not free. Which type of wiki are you using? We also looked at wikispaces.com. I'm not sure how their passwords are set up on there.
We are certainly on a big learning curve with all these new tools at once!
Ann Nored
My students also like to use Wikipedia as a solitary source. I have started qualifying my assignments with something like "you can use widipedia as a starting point, but you may only reference more reliable sources in your paper". That seems to work well. Hope that helps.
Thank you for you comment about using Wikipedia as a source. These kids will be laughed out of university for using Wikipedia.
I'm not 100 sure how this works, but I think that some wiki programs can be put on a local server and give the students a little anonymity to each other, while allowing the administrator to track changes amongst users. The IT guys were at school until 5 pm today, so I would wait to crack them with this question.
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