I stumbled on this meditation on wikis and instruction with the random page link:
To me the Wiki makes teaching and learning collaborative not only as a process but as the product as well. It makes teachers out of the students and conversely students out of the teachers. It creates a shift toward project based learning and process oriented pedagogies. It allows for the teaching of writing rules, style and voice through the production of the project and not in some isolated unrelated way. Finally it promotes distributed intelligence such that each author/contributor to the wiki adds or creates his or her particular strengths to the writing.
Once again this is a case where the technology will force educators to reinvent how they can best incorporate the wiki into their program and evaluate students’ use of this technology in a meaningful way.
The possibilites lying within the idea of the wiki makes me think that in fact this form of collaboration is a very core traditional experience for many groups. It seems to me that the way a family might work together in a household or, for example, on a farm is similar to the way a group might co-construct a wiki; each person working somewhat independently but very much towards one particular goal or outcome (ie. a farming family’s harvest.) Just as with a wiki the members of the family might build onto the work that another member has completed.
And in that spirit, I went in and corrected a few typos…
I gather by the data this is someone posting from a computer hosted by UBC’s Faculty of Education. This person obviously grooves on the anonymity of the form, noting “It’s not just that wikis are writing without having student’s name neatly at the top of the paper, it’s that they seem to be about exploding the world in which we each sit at our desk (at school or at work) and express what we know for someone to evaluate or learn from.”
