NSBA: Blogging/wikis
October 28th, 2005 | by Tim Wilson |I had the pleasure of hosting a second roundtable discussion this morning. The room was full and we had some good discussion of many of the issues that come up whenver there’s a discussion of blogs, wikis, and other interactive, Web-based tools.
I pointed everyone to James Farmer’s edublogs site where any educator can create a free blog. There was a good mix of bloggers and those interesting in blogging at the session, and I think almost everyone walked away with something new to think about. I passed a “blogroll” sheet around and found a couple bloggers willing to share their URLS. Check out Blogs in the Schools and The Geek’s Classroom.
I was exciting to learn about two sites that I hadn’t explored yet. Matt, of Blogs in the Schools fame, described how he’s using Blogmeister with his students. I’m not sure how I missed this tool that comes from David Walicks’s Landmark Project. Blogmeister puts the teacher in control of what gets published on each student blog and what comments appear via email notification and moderation. I will investigate this further for sure.
The other interesting suggestion was for Web Collaborator, a fusion of wiki and a discussion board. I’m trying to check it out, but I can’t get the site to load. I’ll keep checking.
We talked a bit about Wikipedia, of course, spending a fair bit of time discussing wiki reliability. I continue to contend that “the proof is in the pudding” and consistently find Wikipedia useful. Several other people in the room agreed. I pointed out how any Wikipedia user can mark an article “in dispute.” (See the article on Criticism of the Iraq War for an example as of today.) I just noticed a notice on the Iraq War article that I hadn’t seen before. It says: “This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. This article has been tagged since October 2005.” (There are 9,433 articles currently tagged for “cleanup” as of today.) Interesting.
I hope I’m remembering all of the links I was planning to make in this post. If anyone from the session reads this, please let me know if I forgot anything by posting a comment. (And thanks for coming out bright and early for the session.)
4 Responses to “NSBA: Blogging/wikis”
By Becky on Oct 29, 2005 | Reply
Web Collaborator has been down for more than a month. I keep checking on it, but to no avail. It’s too bad, because it was a great collaboration space. I’m using JotSpot. It has wiki, blog, to-do lists, and a few other things. You can certainly leave comments on the wiki pages. I don’t remember if they have a discussion thread tool, or not. Basic level is free, with more pages and users for a fee.
By James on Oct 31, 2005 | Reply
Thanks for the link ‘n point Tim
By Wesley Fryer on Oct 31, 2005 | Reply
An extension of your thought “the proof is in the pudding” is to say “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” My friend Afan Ottenheimer mentioned this in a podcast on open source in educational IT environments that we did last month. Lots of people are definitely “eating the pudding” when it comes to WikiPedia! The stats on the About WikiPedia article is rather mindblowing. Thanks for sharing the links and thoughts!
By Eric Nicklas on Nov 14, 2005 | Reply
Tim,
I really enjoyed your session and will officially begin blogging today. I was quite pleased to see the ease at which one can blog, setup an RSS and do podcasting. Great stuff! Thanks and I will hope be able to attend sessions yours in the future. This technology is very much in it’s infancy and where it’s going to be in 3-5 is unknown, but it will be there in many different implementations.