Wikis

This chapter on wikis made me aware of different resources available and how it relates to others.  With a new understanding of what blogs are like from the previous chapter, I got a little confused on what the difference was between the two.  Blogs are more so used for stating feelings, reflections, and allows interactive between people.  Wikis try to avoid people’s reflections and biases and have more content information.   With such an easy way of obtaining information that students use for research, I am a little weary of whether the students realize how the information gets on wiki and its validity.  I felt more assured though when the book stated that everyone is smarter than anyone alone and I do believe that together people can achieve more.  I would, however, suggest to students to just use wiki as a starting point for their research and make sure they back it up with more educated knowledge.  By allowing students to use wiki in school, it allows them to take on more responsibility when editing their page or other pages and gives them more pride and motivation to make sure their information is accurate.   

I learned that wikis could be very beneficial in the classroom setting.  They can be used for an array of different tasks, but the one I thought could be the most useful was performing activities, like we are in this technology course.  Students could each be assigned a different chapter in science, for example, and post a summary along with any other resources they may have found that could be useful.  Once all the chapters are compiled, they can use them for reviewing for test and future references.  In doing this activity, I think that the students will learn more because they really have to delve into a topic and will learn it in depth because of the extra research and having to explain it to the class.  The other task that I thought was interesting was having students become interactive on the site and post information they learned.  They can experience what it is truly like to publish something on the web and watch to see if their post gets edited or not.  This could also be a great way to check the validity of the Wikipedia.