I don’t know about these wikis. I like them…and I don’t.
I like the idea that people can collaborate on any given topic and come out with new ideas. One that I’ve found looks fairly interesting. http://teaching-with-technology.wikispaces.com/ has a number of pages on it centered around different types of technologies. People can go on and add other links they’ve found helpful. One page I’m particularly interested on this wiki is one for teachers who use ipads in education. I have recently purchased one for my classroom and really am looking forward to reading about other teachers. I requested to join the wiki…we’ll see if I have some things to offer to it in the future.
One problem that comes with wikis is that as multiple people have permission to edit, things could get changed or deleted accidentally. Also, in the wiki I’m in for a grant program, we meet a few times and work on the wiki at the same time. Our changes will cancel each other out if multiple people are viewing the page and changing it at the simultaneously. It becomes a problem. I wonder if a wiki is really the best tool for us to use in that situation.
As far as I can tell, joining the various wikis and using an RSS feed is tricky business. I’m beginning to feel fragmented with all the different memberships I’ve added since the beginning of this class. I especially like the RSS feed because it is a very easy way to see what others are blogging about, but I don’t love having to check the wikis separately.
You can actually set up a RSS feed to check when a wiki page is changed if you want to. It does provide another tracking mechanism. I agree that we need a way to handle all the forms of information coming at us. That's one reason we're looking at the range of tools out there and eventually will pick the ones that are most useful to continue to follow. Most of us don't have the time or energy to follow more than a few sources of information, but once you find those, you'll find you can't live without them.
ReplyDelete