Saturday, October 17, 2009

Week 7, Thing 17: CL2.0 Wiki - Curriculum Connections

I  guess that I came away from this experience a little confused.  As a wiki, I see the purpose: a gathering spot for curriculum ideas using 2.0 tools.  However, I did not find much there that was usable for the classroom.  Was I looking in the wrong places?  I started on the Blog page and I found some suggestions on ways to spice up my avatar.  I did create a new M & M avatar and posted it in the Sandbox, but to me this seemed like a fun idea to add to my own blog and not necessarily to use in the classroom.  As I went to other pages, there were whole pages that had nothing on them. In the Sandbox, I am still not sure of what the purpose is.  My understanding is that the Sandbox is an area where one can just play and not be afraid of what it looks like.  But can't one also do that with a normal wiki page and just not save any of the changes?  Or go back and edit later?  Also, the content on the sandbox seemed less about play and practice with 2.0 tools, and more about storytelling.

This wiki illustrates to me the dangers of creating a wiki for a wide audience with a wide purpose.  Wikis are an extremely valuable tool for collecting information in one spot and allowing more than one person to add content.  However, it does open itself up to creation of content that is less than quality, especially if opened to a wide audience.  What if the managers of this wiki, posted examples of content that could be posted as way to model what this could look like?  Maybe this would help establish some guidelines for posting without setting any stringent rules, which would be hard to manage and would limit the freedom that wikis afford.  Just a thought...

1 comment:

Lesley Farmer said...

Brilliant insight -- wikis are not good for the hoi polloi