1. Many class wiki help communicate information to students. I can't always tell from the ones I've seen how participatory they are, but if a teacher maintains it regularly it can help with learning. For example, I post assignments, worksheets, PDF readings on my class bulletin board page. The readings are especially valuable because they look better in the original multi color printing plus they save dollars and paper. Students are increasing becoming more comfortable with doing on-line reading.
2. How a class wiki could be helpful.
A. If I were able to set up an interactive wiki, the students and I could share information about assignments. I like the idea of password protecting it so it would be only for my classes, which would allow more communication with fewer risks. The route where I have to approve everything before posting won't work for me. Nothing would ever get posted or I wouldn't get any other work accomplished.
Maybe one could ask a question, and someone else could reply besides me. This would be especially valuable for those who start homework after I go to bed. With longer term assignments or some particularly confusing task, being able to respond to a question only once and future readers could see it would save all of us time.
B. I would like to use it as a place to discuss topics. For example, I might assign an online reading and then have a place to make comments. Much like with on line classes, I could require students to post a number of times per semester. If everyone posted all the time, it would get repetitive and very long with 140 honors chemistry students. Another idea is to assign one or two students to be discussion leaders for a weekly article. They make up the questions to ask or start discussion of the article. I might assess only their participation, while encouraging others to participate.
I share opinions of others that some students will comment in a situation like this where they will never say anything in class. I also know that for some students this would be great because they love to text and to chat.
C. Next year I will be teaching half the classes for a popular course that has been taught by the same person since its inception when the school opened seven years ago. I am sure there will be students who are going to feel cheated because they aren't getting the teacher they expected. I am considering recording his lectures and making them available on an internet site.
D. Students prepare powerpoints on some chemistry topic of interest as a special topic of the week. I could put this on a course wiki, and this would allow students in other classes to see them.
E. I have done web assignments where students download a template of questions or data table. Then they have to report this information back to a master template where all students can add their information. At the end we have a data table with each person's contribution. Sometimes I will also narrow their search times by providing links to where they can find the information. Two quick sources come to mind, something from SciLinks.org (NSTA service of picking best websites for teachers) or when doing environmental topics the CIA data base.
Questions and concerns I have at this moment about using Blogs and Wikis for education.
1. Reading various blogs is an up and down process; some are interesting, some are not. During a summer or this class where I have time to follow my interests, this uneven value and content is easier to live with. I don't think the nature of blogs and especially the comment section will ever be 100% useful, but here are some things I wish more would consider.
A. side bar table of contents so you could quickly get to a topic that might be of interest to you.
B. When mention is made of another web site, include some description of what is there in addition to providing the link. A descriptor can help me decide if this is truly germane or an interesting digression.
C. I wish more comment sections could be organized around by thread. Sometimes there are several areas of comment. I may only find one of them useful, but because the comment section, is chronological, reading through all of them is necessary to see which ones discuss my topic of interest. Very often, if the number of comments exceeds 10 or 20, and most were things like "Way to go." "Totally agree with you." "Thanks for posting," I move on. I know there must be a way to do this, but many blogs don't use it. For example, my wife's daughter is an ultimate (frisbee) player, and often likes to follow her daughter's tournament information. The posts on rec.sport.disc are more topical and easier to ignore some.
I am sure some of this is a learned skill. In other MSU classes, discussion is done on D2L. With this you get a menu, showing connect to thread. Because this is done by title, and if users are good with including relevant information or content summary in the title, you can see if this is something you would like to open. However, the easy path is to press the reply button. So, it looks like your post is still in response to "having trouble with lab 4" but the actual discussion is personal chat about the individual's horses. I am learning by watching what shows up in the Update section for the class posts how titles can be useful. For example, when the update shows someone added two words to the Blog post, this usually means that this is a new blog site to follow. My department members at school are getting very good at putting as much of the message as possible in e-mail subject lines. Sometimes the title is the entire message, and I've found this helps manage a file with only one look at it.
D. I still don't see how managing more information is done by creating more. To use a blog well for education, it shouldn't encourage the wondering, valuable as this can be sometimes for serendipity finds.
Good thoughts on using wikis in the classroom, Tom. I'm thinking of perhaps using them as a way for my chem students to write their GROUP lab report. ...and maybe even view some old ones and to see what they might look like, as well as grade them (according to the rubric I use) to see how my grading compares to theirs. Some good potential there, I think.
ReplyDeleteSome great ideas about using wikis in the classroom Tom.
ReplyDeleteSome points about your Questions and Concerns section:
1.A. You can categorize each post by adding labels to them when you create them. The list of labels will show up on the side bar if you add it as a gadget in the customize your blog layout section. That way, you/ your audience can search posts by topic.
1.B. Good point, I too have thought this would be helpful. I think sometimes you can set it up so you get more information about a link when you scroll over it, I'm not sure if this is the case with Blogger, we'll have to check it out.
1.C. I definitely agree with you regarding the multiple threads being hard to follow. I think this is a pretty common problem for collaborative wikis were everyone is adding discussion threads to different pages. Sometimes the discussion threads are repeated in other sections of the wiki, or the titles are not relevant to the content of the thread or not descriptive enough. I think we'll all get better at this as the course progresses.