This little post is about the fourth chapter in Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. I found this chapter a little more informative and interesting than chapters 2 and 3. I am particularly interested in using wikis in my classroom, as I think they will engage the students and motivate contributions to the class. I am concerned about the possible fees involved, however. I saw that Wikispaces.com wants to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators, which implies that these things usually cost money. I fear that by the time I am actually eligible to get a wiki space as an educator that there will be some sort of prohibitive cost (I have no idea how much they would cost if I don’t get one of the free ones). My husband says that wikis are free, so I am a little confused about this. He says “The software is free- you just have to put it somewhere.” I imagine I will understand this better at some point. Do educators always have a free place to put it? As I am typing this post, my husband says, “Oh, I see. Wikispaces is giving away free ‘Premium Packages’ to educators. You pay to get rid of the advertisements.” I am sure I will learn more about this later.
I also think Richardson brings up an interesting point when he says that Wikipedia works because there are far more people who want to make it accurate than those who want to mess it up. If the whole idea of Wikipedia had been initially presented to me, I would have probably said that it would never work precisely because of the people who would want to vandalize it. I am glad that it seems to be working and that there are so many people who want to make it good. I hope that this same principal would apply with school wikis, and I think that being able to track exactly who posts what and when will help to cut back on problems (which is not possible with Wikipedia, from what I understand).
I find it fascinating that South Africa already has its entire national curriculum on a wiki. That is fantastic. We need to get with the program (even if we don’t have a national curriculum yet, states could do this just as well)!
I’ve been hearing about ideas in California to move to textbook-free classrooms as part of their budget situation. Seems entirely possible with wikis. There are also a number of educator/student wiki platforms, so fear not about access and cost.
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