Greg’s Blog - principal (le?) learning

Dean Shareski
has the following to say about why we should be using wikis in education:

“So, why all this educational wiki-use? I think the answers are pretty straightforward:

1. Wikis are collaborative, and one of the ideas we want students and teachers to both understand and LIVE is the idea that groups of people can generally come up with better ideas and solutions than people working in isolation.
2. Wikis are iterative, meaning that they improve over time. They are not a single snapshot or a static creation, but rather a dynamic, living creation that can continue to grow as ideas change and evolve over time.
3. Wikis are free. As teachers, we like free stuff. And wikis don???t cost anything to create in our present climate of abundant web 2.0 free tools.
4. Wikis are RSS subscribable, which makes them easier to track and update. More information services in the coming years will embrace RSS for good reason: Pulling information of interest to you is much more preferable than having information PUSHED to you that may or may not be desired.
5. We learn best by experiencing pedagogy and technology: Using wikis permits teachers to take on the role of learners, and directly experience how powerful but yet simple wikis are and can be for instruction??? and especially group work.
6. Wikis are fast to create and update. I???ve been making webpages to accompany my educational technology workshops since the mid-1990s, but I???ve never used anything as fast and easy as a wiki. Yes, using a tool like Dreamweaver I can create a website with many more bells and whistles??? but our focus in education should generally be more on CONTENT and IDEAS rather than bells and whistles. (Vendors and our own students may lose sight of that idea often, but as the teachers in the room we shouldn???t.)
7. Wikis can emphasize the idea that learning is ongoing rather than one-shot, and enable conversations and idea threads to continue long after the staff development session or group project deadline is over.”

agree …. or not ….??

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 8:16 pm and is filed under wiki.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.