Before reading any of the information below, I invite you to watch a short and entertaining 3 minute video that demonstrates how WIKIs are used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY
Wiki wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick" or "super-fast. Wikis are collaborative web sites that allow multiple authors to create and edit information on the web site.
Tips for using a Wiki:
1. Anyone can change anything. Wikis are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined.
2. Wikis use simplified hypertext markup: simplified webpage language, you do not need to know anything about webpage or web design to use a wiki.
3. WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether. Wiki page titles often eschew spaces to allow for quick page creation and automatic, markup-free links between pages within (and sometimes across) wiki systems.
4. Content is ego-less, time-less, and never finished. Anonymity is not required but is common. With open editing, a page can have multiple contributors, and notions of page "authorship" and "ownership" can be radically altered.
5. Wiki pages are rarely organized by chronology. They are most often organized by context, by links in and links out, and by whatever categories or concepts emerge in the authoring process.
Educational Uses for Wikis
Why are they important in education? Knowing how to learn and how to participate in creating new knowledge are increasingly essential life skills. Knowledge-building networks aim to engage groups in producing new knowledge, advancing the frontiers of knowledge of the group. Wikis establish a community of learning and allow students to use other people and learners as an important resource. Wikis may be the beginning of a way to offer a collaborative learning opportunity for online Technology Education students while incorporating the component of service learning. Online learning supports a collaborative learning model, which is comprised of the elements of presence, collaboration, reflective/transformative learning, technology, social constructivism, and interaction/communication that shape collaboration and a sense of community.
A few different ways Wikis have been used in educational environments:
Sketchpads and Brainstorming: create updated lists or collections of links as an informal bulletin board.
Meeting planning: a provisional agenda is drawn up and the URL for the wiki is sent to the participants, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda serves as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online, allowing the participants or anybody else to review and annotate the proceedings.
Build reference lists and outlines: brainstorm instructional strategies and suggestions.
New Job Postings: store and organize content for a major new job posting and career development Web site that it is developing.
Planning a conference: collect supporting resources and to gather contributions from invited participants. Use wikis during the conference, live, with laptops and wireless access, to record group work. Following the conference, participants subsequently edit their collaborations.
Educational Research: Graduate courses employ wikis as a support for collaborative experiments in composition and as a prompt for reflection on the nature of online writing and reading.
Authors: upload manuscripts of their novels to incorporate the best edits and suggestions into the next draft of the book. Readers can also save alternative chapters and related pages.
Writing Instruction: At Teaching Wiki (http://teachingwiki.org), Joe Moxley, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, lists a number of the medium’s strengths for the teaching of writing skills: wikis invigorate writing ("fun" and "wiki" are often associated); wikis provide a low-cost but effective communication and collaboration tool (emphasizing text, not software); wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts; In addition to fostering the development of writing skills as they are already understood, wikis may prove to be invaluable for teaching the rhetoric of emergent technologies.
Network literacy: teaching students the meaning and how to write in a collaborative environment.
Constructivist teaching philosophy: To truly empower students within collaborative or co-constructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities. The instructor’s role shifts to that of establishing contexts or setting up problems to engage students. In a wiki, the instructor sets the initial task and the students work as a collaborative group.
Academic Projects: students with common service projects can share ideas, relate the theories, concepts, and methodologies to the e-service, and assist one another in brainstorming and problem solving.
Case Study Research Methods: chosen for conducting the case study, and the following section analyzes the results.
Some of my favorite quotes
“Even confirmed technophobes have grasped and mastered the system quickly. The structure of wikis is shaped from within—not imposed from above. Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure”(Lamb, 2004).
"SoftSecurity,"(Lamb, 2004) relies on the community, rather than technology, to enforce order.
“Characteristic of the wiki’s irreverent attitude, the front page announces that those who do not wish to "edit, erase, enhance, beautify, dullify, nullify, derange, arrange, or simply change" the wiki space should "then accept the fact that [they] will always be complacent, and easily controlled."Then, presumably, they should just go away” (Lamb, 2004).
Want to try out you WIKI skills? Here's the web address to my WIKI that I have started as a means of practice just for you!
Blogging and second language learning go hand in hand as they represent many forms of new literacies. They include written, visual, auditory (if there is sound) , media and critical literacies. They are considered a multimodal text as students, teachers and all users must use refined reading, scanning, predicting, analyzing and interfering skills to accurate absorb content from a technical form of communication.
Blogs can display pictures and video, include audio and Flash, and even store other files like PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets for linking.
There are many schools starting to experiment with the technology as a way to communicate with students and parents, archive and publish student work, and manage the knowledge that members of the school community create.
We can use a Weblog for many different classroom activities in all subject areas. Blogging can be a fun and creative way for students to express themselves in any educational context.
In the past they have been used to:
1. Carry on conversations about a book outside of class (the author has even joined in!) [http://weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/beesbook]. Parents have also taken part in their children's lives by reading the book for themselves and holding discussions parallel to the students.
2. Audioblogs help students work on reading and pronunciation skills. You can record and post the audio files on a Weblog and students play the files back at home when they want to hear how they sound. Great for the parents that don't speak French and wonder how to make all those little sounds!
3.Librarians use Weblogs as a resource by starting conversations about books and literacy.
4.Students use Weblogs as digital portfolios or just digital filing cabinets, where they store their work.
5.Teachers use blogs as classroom portals, where they archive handouts, post homework assignments, and field questions virtually from parents and students
How have Weblogs influenced your second language learning or teaching? How has blogging been useful or engaging for you, your child or your students? Do you have any tips for teachers that are new to blog technology?
I look forward to hearing your comments, suggestions and feedback.
I've created this blog as a means of communication among second language teachers around the world. The focus will be in English as a Second Language (ESL) and French as a Second Language (FSL) and French Immersion (FI). The goal of this blog is for you to learn easy and cost efficient ways to maximize learning potential when teaching and learning in a second language environment.
Each month will feature a specific teaching or learning strategy of Information Communication in Technology (ICT): 1. How it can be incorporated into a second language learning envirnoment 2. Benefits of using the technical method in the classroom 3. Comments, feedback and suggestions from students, parents and teachers involved in second language learning and ICT's.
It is my goal to have this blog as a means of bilingual (French and English) communication. Please feel free to post your comments, suggestions and feedback in French or English.
How can we use technology effectively to maximize second language learning?
This blog is focused on English as a Second Language (ESL), French as a Second Language (FSL) and French Immersion (FI).The goal of this blog is to learn and share easy and cost efficient ways to maximize learning when teaching and learning with technology in a second language environment. Periodically, it will feature a strategy in Information Communication in Technology (ICT) and how to incorporate it into second language learning.
