Week 7, Thing 16 - Wikis

When I first heard the word "wiki" it was in combination with the word "stick." I discovered that a "wiki stick" was a malleable wax-like stick that occupational therapists used with students who needed to develop better fine motor coordination. I even got to try one out - and I loved playing with it. So when I heard the word ""wiki" in combination with Web 2.0 tools, I sort of figured that it wasn't something to play with, but guess what? I was wrong!

I immediately fell in love with the BookLoversWiki. I am forever looking for new reads and now I can get suggestions from other avid readers and post my own. I can also see my students getting excited about books they have loved - or hated - given the opportunity to express their opinion in this medium.

Ever the believer in laziness being the mother of shortcuts, it was very exciting to see the Library Instruction Wiki. Our district has been hoping to develop a comprehensive library curriculum K-12 for the past few years. This wiki can give us a place to start ... and wikis in general can give a place to collaborate without having to gather for meetings. It can also give students a place to research, post, or comment on information that is part of the curriculum. Instead of individual research papers which go nowhere beyond student and teacher, how neat would it be for fifth graders to develop an "explorer" wiki?

When I think about the adage, "Knowledge is power," I can see that developing a wiki gives the user the power to create and adapt a knowledge base. In another on-line course, I developed a web-page on Teacher Web. Not able to afford the paltry sum (long story) to keep it "up" for a year, I went to my various school tech people to see if the pages could be redeveloped with the district's "Dream Weaver" software. I was turned down - no one had the time either to do it or to teach me - and I lost the work. Oh if only I knew about wikis at the time!

In education today, there is a lot of talk about wanting students to "own their own knowledge" and to be responsible for "taking charge of their learning." Developing a wiki plays right into this philosophy. What's more, because it is on the Web, a wiki can create conversations between students across the country and throughout the world, accomodating varying opinions and schools of thought.

In our previous assignment, author Rick Anderson stated that we needed to eliminate barriers between patrons and information and that if services could not be used without training, then the services needed to be fixed. What addresses those issues better than wikis?