Wikis and Blogs - Ideas and Questions

Here are some ideas and questions about the resources we discussed today:

Wikis:

There is an obvious application here for students to write collaboratively. When we assign reports for group projects the students often divide up the labor, each doing a separate section. When I get the final copy it is often disjointed and obviously just copied and pasted together. Doing the report in a wiki wouldn’t necessarily prevent this, but I think it would make it much more likely that students would actually collaborate with the huge benefit that they could do it anytime from anywhere.

Another obvious application is peer editing of essays. The history feature would be a great way for a student to see how others viewed their work.

What about having students write their own text for the course? Maybe I could provide an outline and have them fill in the content.

A big question for me with wikis is how to evaluate them. Wouldn’t it be nice if the text could be color coded so that I could tell in a glance who had contributed what. Something like what turnitin.com does.

Also how does this work when the content is more opinion oriented? Wikipedia is factual. In most cases facts that are wrong get corrected and then stick. If something is more opinionated then couldn’t it just keep going back and forth as users change what others have said. Maybe wikis aren’t the right tool in that case.

Blogs:

Blogs are an incredible professional resource for me. As Dave mentioned today, I now have weak ties to people whose ideas I would never have been exposed to otherwise.

I am having a much harder time figuring out how I would use a blog with my students. I don’t yet see the added value in my context (chemistry). I’ve seen examples of schools that are beginning to use blogs to communicate with parents. I know I get tons of paper from my young son’s teachers describing what they did each day. I’d much rather subscribe to a RSS feed and save a few trees.

Maybe I just need more time to consider how this tool could be used.