I’m staring at 26″ of snow outside my window, gearing up for some serious shoveling, but thinking about Wikis instead. What really are they? How do you create one from scratch? And what uses could they have in the classroom? The site linked above is the first that I have found that really uses wikis to any real degree in the classroom. All of Matt’s students have their own wiki pages where they have classwork and photos and all sorts of stuff. He’s even created a wiki where his students are all wikiing about the writing process. Some pretty interesting stuff to be sure.
But I keep coming down to this…I could pretty much go into any one of those pages and change the content at will. I guess I could erase all of it. Yeah, it would be archived in some way. But I could create some serious havoc with the content if I wanted to.
Working in a Wiki with eBN has been pretty interesting too. But why not use a collaborative Manila site for doing it? Seems like the only additional step would be to add the members you wanted to work with and then let them have at it. Sure, it’s nice to see the revision history, and I can see how that might be effective in a writing class. But am I missing something here? What do you get from a Wiki that you wouldn’t get from a Web log and a whole lot more?
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