I mostly work with homeschooled parents and teachers from private or charter schools in the US. My hypothesis is that because this crowd is already spending a lot of energy on content and pedagogy innovations, they want their technology to be invisible and super-easy. I have not tried to reach out and recruit tech geeks specifically, but my population is already only 5-7% of the general, so multiplying that by another 5% of early adopters will leave me with a vanishing minority.
Recently I recommended one of the most tech-savvy and adventurous of my local homeschool group to take a WE course. Well, I sent it to the group, the lady asked me about it and I confirmed the recommendation. She said the amount of technical content, rather than pedagogy, was something she did not expect and did not like. In her words: "I thought we would talk about particular interesting ways to teach with wikis, student projects and the like. But we talked about editing itself most of the time." She did begin using a wiki for her next project with students, so overall the goal of capacity increase can be said to be reached; but her pick was a WYSIWYG platform, I believe. I recently had to choose a wiki for two of my math content development projects, since my earlier platform development efforts are on hold. I would love to do it on WE, because I love the community. But I tried WikiSpaces and now Curriki, and the copy-paste embed of widgets plus WYSIWIG made the decision for me. I don't see much community support on WikiSpaces (maybe I don't know where to look). Both WikiEducator and Curriki offer individual support for project organizers. What would happen if several hundred of people I plan to invite all needed individual technical support at once? This is the scenario I anticipate with any wiki syntax involved. My conclusion: WE is great for small, organic, person-by-person growth at the moment. A project involving large numbers of people together for a quick (wiki-wiki?) collaboration may find other platforms more inviting, unless they are specifically here for the wiki syntax training. For my part, I would like more potential group project leaders to focus on the growth of WE, and that's why I am working on organizing a WE presentation for the Math 2.0 interest group. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 5:23 AM, NELLIE DEUTSCH < [email protected]> wrote: > Paul, > I have been working with K-12 teachers for over 30 years. I am always > amazed by the ability of the Ministry of Education (Israel) to enforce > innovations (including technology) irrespective of teachers' resistance, > unions and other political groups. Educational policies and mandates seem to > work. You may ask if this is a democratic way of doing things, but even the > NCLB policy of 2001 was mandated in the US and is enforced in very > undemocratic means. > Warm wishes, > Nellie Deutsch > Sharing is Caring! > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
