I found several sample classes where "wiki's" have been used in education.
http://welkerswikinomics.wetpaint.com/page/Intro+to+Economics+and+Microeconomics is one example, and frankly this one was not too impressive. Probably you should save your time and not visit it.
Some seemed to have a good idea such as http://mathjmss.wetpaint.com/?t=anon. In this site the hope is that people will share ideas they have for math education. Sadly, few have shared, which is a danger of counting on others to contribute content.
A much more useful educational wiki is at: http://businesslaw.pbwiki.com/ Here, there is a "business law" class and you can hear podcasts, read chatpers from the text, download contract forms, links to articles, powerpoints and more. It wasn't quite perfect, I would have liked to see all current textbook assignments linked onto the wiki (they were using an assigned text that had to be purchased), but this was one of the better examples that I saw.
I did find another "new media" class wiki at : http://jmsc.hku.hk/blogs/webjourno/
Given David's comments on other blogs about donuts and brownosing, I will not comment on which syllabus I found to be more exciting.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Not sure if it's more sad or funny that the site you worried about us wasting our time on won the Edublog award for best educational wiki for 2007 :)
Ouch--that is sad! did you think i was too harsh in my assessment?
No, I think the site is quite indicative of smaller wikis in general--lots of effort obviously went into it, but when it comes down to usability and utility, it falls a little flat...Maybe it goes back to Kimberly's comments about critical mass...
Critical mass is definitely key; the main question becomes how do you attract large numbers of users in order to reach critical mass? You won't attract large numbers of people to an empty wiki, that's for sure. It seems like there needs to be enough value that people are willing to come in the first place, and then while they're there maybe they will contribute...
Post a Comment