Hello everyone! I must admit that I have been struggling with the idea of using a wiki in my classroom because of the fact that "a wiki is a Website where anyone can edit anything anytime they want" (Richardson, 2009, p. 55). I have a hard time seeing my seventh grade math students appropriately participating in the use of a wiki. Even more, students using Wikipedia as a reliable resource has always been a pet-peeve of mine until I began to read Richardson's description of it as "the poster child for the collaborative construction of knowledge and truth that the new, interactive Web facilitates" (Richardson, 2009, p. 57). It was eye opening to read that so many big name companies and major news outlets actually use Wikipedia as a source for information.
I have now decided to give Wikipedia a chance and begin my journey of creating wikis by designing one for our group. I know that this is a group effort, so please feel free to add/edit any changes that you would like. If there is something bothering you about the wiki and you would like to see it fixed, please leave a comment and I will be sure to fix it as soon as possible.
http://technologynewbies.wikispaces.com/
Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
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About Me
- Bull
- Washington, United States
- Hello and welcome to my blog! I am a 7th grade math teacher and a student working towards my masters in technology. This is my very first educational blog so please help me make it successful!
2 comments:
Good Day,
I'm new to the idea of starting a Wikis as well. An interesting thing though, I literally just finished my B.S. and sealing up my certificate in Virginia. During the time I was working on the B.S. I encountered different attitudes about sources such as Wikipedia from different profs. Initially I anticipated that there would be a inverse relationship between the profs age and their level of acceptance of such things.
That didn't really pan out. Because there was a wide variety of opinion I started paying attention to news stories etc, and talking to the profs about why they accepted or rejected collaborative online knowledge bases.
the ones who were against typically didn't trust them and the ones who did suggested that it was the students responsibility to do some fact checking etc. on the information. Most profs would only allow 1 wiki-type ref in the bibliography to count towards the requisite number of citations (if one was required).
One teacher (PHd. no less) constantly refered us to answers.com, which is a metasearch engine aimed at academia. It is good because it always pulls wikipedia and online versions of Britanica and the like. It will also pull area specific journals etc.
What I learned from all of this is to use any source as a starting point. Each wikipedia entry had sources and links at the bottom that show where the author(s) got their info, and direct the used towards more information.
These can be a rich source of data to be mined and sifted through to fact check and to expand ones depth of field on a subject.
in 2005 NPR had a short article on a study that the editors of the journal "Nature" had done comparing wikipedia to the online Britanica. The results were that the wiki was not significanly more flawed than Britanica. (here is a link to the archived article > http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=5055388&m=5055389) The most interesting thing to me was that Britanica had an average 3 errors or omissions in the first place!
I understand that Wikipedia has tightened up their security and oversight quite a bit in the intervening 4 years as well.
As far as your 7th graders go, perhaps you could do a virtual but not online wiki with training wheels using Word, Publisher or PowerPoint as a platform. Perhaps everyone in your classes could have access to it through your school's network without letting the general populace in. Once the wiki was pretty well nailed down you could launch it into wiki-cyber-space and see what happens, knowing that the original material is safe on the mother ship.
Let me know what you think. Thanks.
David
David-
Your experience with your professors and Wikipedia is very interesting. I like the idea of using Wikipedia as a "starting point". I think that too often students take the very first answer that comes to them and believe it to be true. I believe that it is important for us as teachers to help students learn how to question the answers that they find. I know that many of my students have found mistakes in our textbooks and it is just as important that they find the mistakes online by researching various sources.
I will have to check out the article that you mentioned and make sure to start teaching my students how to become "expert decision makers" as Dr. Dede explained in our video this week.
Thanks for the information!
Erin
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2008).Understanding the impact of technology on education, work, and society. Baltimore: Author.
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