photo © 2007 Andjam79 | more info(via: Wylio)

The wiki experience in this class was very similar to my other wiki collaborations, lacking something.  As a group we got the assignment completed and I agree, for the most part, to the top five’s but I found myself wondering again if there was a better tool for the job.

 5 Strategies for using Social Media:

• Learning Styles: Enhance a lesson by reaching students through a multitude of learning styles; for instance, visual, tactile, and auditory.
• Students are already there: Capitalize on the way that students already communicate during their daily lives and use social media to enhance their learning.
• Collaboration: Utilize the wisdom of the entire classroom for the group to progress collectively to a greater destination than what they could have achieved on their own.
• Action Research Project: Research other academic uses of social media to determine the advantages of field tested classroom techniques.
• Digital citizenship: Teach digital etiquette. Discuss public identity management and the appropriate time and use of technology, privacy, copyright, and flame wars.

 5 Key Challenges in using Social Media:

• Digital Citizenship: Navigating through copyright, plagiarism, privacy and digital identity and how these issues apply to the read/write digital culture.
• Access: Supporting students with limited computer and/or internet access at home or in school so that they are not marginalized.
• Pedagogy first: Providing another platform to network while yielding sufficient educational outcomes without negatively impacting student learning
• Terms of Use: Ensuring age limits and/or other terms of service on various social media sites are followed and kept apprise of by the learning institution and its administrators.
• Changing relationships: Navigating the legal, social and classroom ramifications of using social media between student and teacher.

 Using the discussion board has been wonderful for discussions.  Conversations can go off on tangents as students reply at different parts of threads.    You can tell who was talking, at what time and how much.  Using the wiki was great for gathering the initial thoughts but after that it got clunky.  It was hard to determine who was editing what and when.  I found myself copying and pasting to a word document and printing, which is something I never do, to try and give myself a sense of structure when editing.  A wiki as a collaborative tool is wonderful but the real power comes from the ability to edit the document in a meaningful manner.  See revisions, communicate with other users and create a final product that is a compilation of a number of people’s ideas.  My other experience with Wiki’s has been PB Wiki, Moodle Wiki & Moodle OU Wiki .  Of the three PB wiki was by far the best tool to have multiple users on at once to create and edit a document.  I am a little wiki jaded as none of these have allowed for the edits to happen in a meaningful, collaborative setting to produce a document that reflected the work of a number of users to create something bigger and better than what they could have produced individually.  I have had far more success with a shared google doc.    

I will keep working with wiki’s as I can see them as great tool, you need only look at Wikipedia to see that they can be incredibility powerful.  If this task had been assigned to the discussion board it would have been a logistical mess.  It would have been hard to follow, to print and to gather final information.  The wiki, while clunky, served its purpose of getting 18 people to put down their many thoughts and agree on a top five.