Week #7, Thing #16

Wikis!! I love how many uses our community of educators can find for Wikis. It took me quite a while to discover the extent and power of wikis as I looked through several of the resources and example pages. (Part of the problem with getting through an assignment is finding myself deep into the subject matter of a related link found somewhere on a previous page. Hmmm...wikis are not for the attention deficit disordered, but what fun. Anyway, I particularly liked the idea of groups of students creating wikis about a teacher assigned topic, asking the class to then use the student created content pages as their source for studying for an exam. Or, as one teacher did, ask students to select a topic from a teacher created set of topics and, using the web, their textbooks and other reference material, create a wiki as their final exam. Students would have to document their sources, of course. Also, professional collaboration can be made so much more efficient by using wikis to compose documents that call for collaborative thinking and design. And, wikis are a natural when it comes to creating a subject guide or pathfinder for students on particular topics.