Thing 7: Death Rides a Pale Otter

It's been a while since I've updated my blog, mostly because I've was laid up on my back for about two weeks with swine flu/Pneumonia. But all of that is in the past. So back to the wonderful, terrifying world of Web 2.0. This week is Wiki's and I have to suggest a bit of skepticism about the enterprise that I had at the outset. I was familiar with some Wiki's, particularly Wikipedia which I use copiously. But in general my experience with Wiki's had been, less than (to me) impressive. Our curriculum department runs numerous Wiki's and to be honest (sorry Caroline) they had seemed to me at best to be a place where you could store a lot of documents, but they really had not made much of an impression on me.

I should probably explain WHY this was as the rest of the post is going to be me explaining why I was surprised how much I liked the Educational Wiki's on the 23 things page. By nature I am an introvert and a non-joiner. I don't typically join groups and I am probably an individualist to the point of unhealthiness at times. I don't join groups or clubs and when words like "collaborate" and "community" are thrown around like they are intrinsic goods my eyes tend to glaze over (for those of you into Myers-Briggs I am a hard INTJ which should explain a lot). This is a long way of saying that dispositionally the ability to share and collaborate isn't intrinsically a high priority for me unless it LEADS to something. That was the ledge that really allowed me to get into the Wiki's I looked at.

What impressed me most was the degree to which these Wiki's allowed the mustering of multiple Web 2.0 operations towards a single goal. Take for example the Educational Origami page that Caroline recommended. The page in many ways features the best elements of a blog, a message board, and a Diigo page into one seamless whole. You could literally spend hours perusing multiple elements of web 2.0 applications. The organization takes some getting used to but once I oriented myself I found it amazing how much was in the Wiki. I am not surprised Caroline finds this page so relevant for her job. I wish their was a wiki like this for assessment.

The next Wiki I checked out was the Civil War "Follow Me" Wiki. I picked this one because my wife (who is a kindergarten teacher) has a similar program she runs with her class where each child gets to take the class stuffed monkey (Walton) home with them and then has to write a short paper on what they did and provide photos. The "follow me" Wiki's are in many ways just a fun extension of this. On this Wiki a sixth grade student from Pennsylvania who is a civil war buff. As she travels around to battlefields she takes her Teddy Bear "Sallie Ann" with her. A helpful map shows all of the sites visited and links to places to learn more about them. A really simple concept applied in a neat way. This really seems like a way to tap into kids unique curiosity and creativity.

The concept behind the Civil War Wiki was very simple. On the more complex end was the Flat Classroom Project, the Wiki of numerous high school students around the globe organized around Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" book and concept. The Wiki is notable to me in the way it literally instantiates Friedman's hypothesis. Students from as far flung areas as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Georgia, Montana, Texas, & Australia all collaborate with one another. The idea of linking up individuals from across the globe is interesting, but what actually made it relevant to me was the degree to which the schools/students were working toward a singular goal, that of increasing communication between diverse students through web 2.0 technology. Given how long the site had been in place (at least 3 years by my count) it was impressive how much had been generated by the students involved.

Much as with Diigo, I was surprised at the degree I found myself liking the Wiki's in general. I don't know if I could say I am totally enamored (some of the Wiki's I looked at still seemed to much of a self-contained "how cool is it I made a wiki" rather than something that was actually useful. But the many examples of Wikis that did just that have swayed me that this is a medium that has a valuable role in the 21st century classroom. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get back to yelling at the kids to get off of my lawn. There that felt better.