Reflections at Pi

I love wikis. I used them on a road trip I took to get suggestions from friends and family on where to go and what to see on the road. I’ll be using it again for a trip to Spain. I’m not traveling alone on this one. The wiki will give my travel partners and me a way to communicate, rather than relying strictly on email or text messages. I’m excited!

In terms of the classroom, we’re going to try constructing a wiki around election issues, to deepen the discussion and debate about current topics and the candidates. In the spring, I want to use a wiki for a writing workshop, so that kids can edit each other’s work and not delete the original work. Each commentator will then be accessible to the author for questioning. I think it will make my spring workshop smoother, and it will give me a chance to see how much the kids remember from the fall wiki experiment.

In terms of the wikis I viewed, I liked Brian Smith’s AP Environmental Science class page. It looked like a good gateway to the class by providing resources the students could use, scads of articles around the topic, and a discussion area. What I wish it had was a syllabus. As a non-class participant, I wasn’t sure what the scope and the content of the class covered. I’m sure his students were quite aware, however. Their enthusiasm (and the teacher’s) seemed tangible even through the wiki format. I also looked at Carl’s page on Venezuela. What I couldn’t figure out was which parts were teacher generated and which came from students. The lack of crediting sources bugged me a bit. It made me wonder, what is the standard policy on crediting sources on a Wiki. Is there one? I know all about the controversy involving Stephen Colbert and Wikipedia, but I wondered if there was a commonly agreed upon rule or rules in terms of academic use and sourcing.

On a totally unrelated note, in terms of a visual aspect, I tend to lead with my left, which means looking to my right on the computer screen. I’m used to looking to the right of the screen for archives, etc. It took me a bit to visually notice that the info I was seeking was on the left.