Starting Conversations

by Will Richardson via XplanaZine

The post started by looking at the two sides of wiki and blogs:

the other half of the equation, the consumption of blog and wiki and podcast content by students and teachers.

The discussion obviously led to the validity and accuracy of wiki and blogs. Yes, students produced wiki and blogs are not necessarily the best sources of information.

On another note, I believe we should think outside the box when thinking about the use of wiki and blogs in classrooms. I believe we need not (should not ???) think in terms of information production and consumption (too much an information transfer type pedagogy). We can think of wiki as a collaborative environment for students to co-author an article. We can think of blogs as a mean for students to negotiate a common understanding of the subject matter. We should focus more on using the technology to support the learning process rather than using wiki and/or blogs to record the outcome of the learning. To this effect, we may state clearly to the students at the beginning of the term that whatever wiki or blogs which are created during the course will be deleted at the end of the term. Learning involves experimenting and taking risks. We don't want the writing that we left during our learning process to daunt us in years to come. We can also keep the wikispace and blogosphere slightly cleaner.

Tags: use of wiki and blog