Daily Archives: May 7, 2006

Over the past couple of weeks I have been really delving into wikis and setting a couple up for classes at my school to use. It was timely that James announced the edublogs.org partnership with wikispaces because that is the host for several of the wikis currently on the go. I'm also co-authoring a wiki with fellow South Oz edublogger Al for a joint presentation and we have this one at seedwiki. Currently, seedwiki is free from our South Australian schools internet filter system while wikispaces is blocked hence the reason for our choice. Al believes strongly that for teachers in our system to have a go at using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom, there needs to be as few barriers as possible including not having to deal with filters. I concur (sort of) but I think educators should also have access to the best free tools available and there won't be any shift in filter policy on edublogs or wikispaces if the powers that be can point and say, "No-one in our system wants to use them anyway." We'll agree to disagree.
I haven't really gotten into wikis much before this year even though I have been aware of their potential. I just haven't had a really good purpose and we all know purpose drives learning. So, at the moment I have a personal wiki with nothing on it, the MYLU wiki for our presentation at the Middle Schooling Conference which is starting to take shape and one for our Problem Based Learning program. I was originally trying to combine the MYLU wiki with the PBL so that at the conference we could showcase the program. But as I started adding pages and content, I realised that the two couldn't work together, especially as I wanted the PBL section to be driven by student input. So, I have come to the conclusion that for me, a wiki has to have a singular purpose.