Are we supposed to do the sandbox?
I never really understood what the purpose of wiki's was until watching this video. I am somewhat confused by the districts decision to incorporate wikis as our class websites. The key to a wiki is that many different users can edit the material in a best practice form. I have a huge disconnect in my brain that says that allowing students access to the course website to edit it as they see fit would be counter-productive. I want to believe that they would take the opportunity to add things responsibly but since I am ultimately responsible for the material I think that our websites need to be filtered by the teacher. I encourage students to send me reviews, articles and other interesting links but I'm not ready for them to post them without being seen first. I found the idea of using this for note-taking or as a review activity intriguing and I may pilot it in a class this year. I also stumbled across an article saying that wikipedia is just as accurate and more up to date than most online encyclopedias. Although it should not be used as a citation I am interested in what others think about using it as a jumping of point for research. The article referencing the above is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm
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I can't really comment on district technology decisions. I do that wikis are for collaboration, blogs should be for communication and your web page should be for information that should be static and always easily accessible.
ReplyDeleteAs far as wikipedia I do think it is a great starting point for research but most students and many teachers see it as their main source of information. Many colleges and universities including University of North Texas do not accept Wikepedia as an authoritative source of information and prohibit its use in scholarly research.
The sandbox exercise lets you see how that feature works. It's up to you to try it or not.
ReplyDeleteMy comment is using wikipedia as a jumping off point and using the resources that they have sourced as a primary source.
ReplyDeleteI highly encourage using wikipedia as a jumping off point. I have been banned from editing content on it, though, as I tried early last year putting false information to catch students using it as a primary source!
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