Jane Weideman wrote:
This is an interesting point, at the WCCE (World Conference on Computers in Education) last week the debate around blog/wiki came up. It was interesting to note that teachers and less technical people almost always prefer blogs, and developer and the more technically minded seem to prefer the wiki format... We were debating which to include in Edubuntu at our Summit, and I was pretty adamant about a wiki being better - now I wonder if the barrier to entry is too high for the average, less technically inclined user (which I gather the majority of teachers will be)
I think it's worth having both a wiki and some sort of blog tool (eg elgg - http://elgg.net), but I don't think wikis are intrinsically too complex for teachers (or pupils) to use, we've used the moodle wiki module (which, FWIW does have wysiwyg editing, although other aspect of the implementation are decidedly sub mediawiki) very effectively for collaborative research, vocab and revision note exercises, as well as for assembling the content of the school magazine, all of which with classes of 9-11 year olds. The big plus of the wiki approach is that it embeds a social, collaborative model of learning, which mirrors many aspects of the open source development process, (see http://www.schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Philosophy#Social_constructivism). That said, the more personalized, individual nature of the blog has its place too, and is certainly a good way of giving learners 'voice'. -- edubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
