Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-Learning Communities, Part 1

These are my liveblogged notes from a webinar I attended today. I realized after the Distance Learning Conference in Madison that I’m not very good at getting my notes up later if I wait and attempt to clean them up. I feel like my liveblogging skills are pretty rough right now, but I don’t think I’ll get any better without practice.

My notes are fairly lengthy, so I’m breaking this into 3 parts: one for each speaker. The Q&A notes will be included with the last speaker. My comments are in all caps. I’ll post a link to the recording as soon as it’s available; right now the only link I can find for this webinar is the registration page. Update: Here’s the link to the archived presentation. Registration is required.

Presenters
Jerry Kane, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Boston College
Howard Rheingold, Author and Professor at Stanford University and UC Berkeley
Jeff Brainard, Director of Marketing, Socialtext

Case Study at Boston College

Jerry Kane

 

Wiki for Computers in Management course

Started with Facebook, but wasn’t able to do enough collaboration there

Benefit: Wisdom of crowds instead of just the single expert instructor

Using wiki now as a mashup to bring other technologies together

Talked about why he likes Socialtext as the platform

How he uses it

  • Wiki Functionality
    • Peer review and evaluation
    • “Open source” final exam
    • Tracks student involvement
  • RSS Feeds
    • Virtual newsstands
    • Links to his blog & Google reader
    • Del.icio.us tags (instructor and students contribute). Creates pages to collect resources for specific topics.
    • Monitors the RSS feed for the wiki to track
  • Other stuff
    • YouTube, Facebook, etc.

Course evals have been strong, but he doesn’t have much to compare it to

Some students list wikis as the most favorite, others list as the least favorite

More about collaboration than the tool THIS IS A GREAT POINT

Improves his workload

You have to provide incentives for people to use it; you can’t just build it and expect people to come

Grading: Gives extra points for best contributions, based on peer evaluation

You have to be willing to give up control and trust students to help with the work

Not about creating more interaction; it’s about creating higher quality interaction
LOVE THIS
DISTINCTION—GREAT JUSTIFICATION FOR USING MORE COLLABORATION

When wikis work

  • Less than 150 people
  • Non-controversial topics
  • Common language
  • Semi-formal setting
  • Dynamic
    environment
  • Trust & respect

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of my notes.

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