Advantages and Disadvantages of a Wiki
I found the wiki collaboration for this portion of the course to be an interesting one. I have used a wiki for other courses in the MET program and it was a very productive and meaningful experience. Though it was great for producing an end product made by all group members, my groups never used a our wiki for the purposes of asynchronous collaboration. Thus, this 565A activity was yet again a new experience for me.
I liked the way in which our cohort was able to add and change contributions to our wiki page. We each posted examples of times in our past when we observed social media being used in education. The wiki served a great purpose here as we were able to participate whenever we wanted. This would work very well in a high school setting as teenagers can be just as active as us professionals.
However, I would have to say that in comparison to our beloved WebCT Vista, our wiki did not work as well – at least for the discussion portion. I did not like how new comments were not highlighted, as they are in WebCT Vista. This made it very difficult to follow the many conversations that evolved. It was not too difficult to follow at first but after a while it required a good memory or a certain amount of time reviewing the many posts. WebCT Vista also shows it has the upper hand by allowing individual posts to be collected and organized by date. This has been very useful in my MET journey have been able to copy all of my posts and save them to look through for my e-portfolio. As far as I know, there is no easy way to do with with a wiki.
References
Wesch, M. (2007). A vision of students today (& what teachers must do). Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/10/a-vision-of-students-today-what-teachers-must-do/
Wesch, M. (2007). YouTube video: A vision of students today. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o