From the Washington Post... -ac
Blogs, Wikis Clicking on Campus
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25305-2005Mar10.html
First the Internet turned colleges upside down, extending classrooms and changing the way people learned. Next came Napster and other file-sharing tools, then Web logs. Now blogs are morphing into the next big thing on campus: wikis.
The wiki, which got its name from the Hawaiian word for "quick," is the scrappy little brother to the blog, an interactive Web page that can be changed by anyone who stumbles upon it. While blogs let people publish their thoughts online, wikis take things a step further, creating freewheeling, collaborative communities: Students can edit one another's work, bounce ideas around or link to infinite other Web sites.
Mark C. Rom uses blogs to heighten involvement among the students in his U.S. government class at Georgetown University. (Photos Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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"Students keep pushing for more interactivity, often in ways I hadn't thought of yet," said Mark L. Phillipson, assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
Phillipson's students can go to a wiki he designed and highlight a phrase in a poem such as John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." From "tender is the night," for example, they could create links to their own essays, a scanned image of the ink-blotted original manuscript, artwork, something about the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with that title -- anything.
Sometimes wikis don't click. But at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some like debates and some shimmy in and out of topics with music, photos and video pulling readers along. One of Phillipson's students drew a picture of a poem; another made a movie. Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking and questioning.
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-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com -----------------------------------
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