Wikis -What Good Are They

Blogs and wikis take education and training out of the confines of the institution. They allow people to learn and gain knowledge from many different sources. My current research interest involves m-learning and the use of cell phones. Liz Kolb is the guru on cell phones for learning. Her blog, Cell Phones for Learning http://www.cellphonesinlearning.com provides the reader with cutting edge information regarding the use of cell phones as learning tools. This information is not yet available in a textbook and most educators are not aware of the resource connections that can be made with a cell phone. Blogs keep pace with the burgeoning change of information. Students in a classroom that is dependent on a textbook and a teacher, who doesn’t subscribe to RSS feeds from blogs, tweets, etc., may ultimately be short changed.Wikis allow for asynchronous collaboration. Wikis are made up of various web pages that can be modified by all members of the group. Members can hold a discussion while making modifications to the pages. In addition, a history of all the alterations is available. Members of the wiki are responsible for creating the content. Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis have created a global collaborative project in which two classrooms, located on opposite sides of the globe, work together to solve real world scenarios http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com based on Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat.” The wiki eliminates the classroom walls and allows for children of different cultures, race, and educational backgrounds to come together to solve a problem.Wikis are not only for collaborative projects. Helen Barrett, a leading authority on e-portfolios, claims a wiki is a free and effective way to create an e-portfolio http://electronicportfolios.org/web20portfolios.html The student can upload his/her artifacts and college and employment recruiters can get a clearer picture of the student’s abilities and personality.I’ve personally used a wiki to do collaborative project in Educ. 8808, 8812, and 8813. In each one of these courses my classmates were spread out across the United States and in one case, a group member was located in South Korea. The wiki was an effective collaboration tool that eliminated the location and time obstacles.