Online Learning: Wielding Wiki's

My First Wiki

While I've made use of massive online wiki sites (like Wikipedia) before, I have never created my own wiki. This week I used PB Works to create an educational wiki and begin to populate it. While some parts of creating my first wiki were pretty simple, I found some downsides to using this tool as a form of educational intercourse and distributed learning platform, which I will discuss in further detail below.

Getting Started with PB Works

To kick off my first personal wiki page, I created an account with PB Works. This alone took several hours as there appears to be some sort of glitch in the registration process where I had to work my way through several help channels before I could get my email address confirmed. Once my account was created, then I created my first workspace. Here's what a blank, default educational account workspace looks like when you generate it:

As you can see, some fields are populated with a bit of information to get you started, but overall, the structure of the wiki is relatively freeform.

Coming from someone who likes to spend time and put effort in developing her own website aesthetic, there are some definite drawbacks to the generic (and un-customizable) wiki format. While I can create additional pages to add content, organization and some functionality. The form is very limited to this not-so-intuitive design. 

Ideas on Implementation

For starters, I don't know that my Middle School students would have an easy time navigating this wiki site. It took me a significant amount of time just to figure out where I go to create pages to add my course outline, assignments, content, etc. While Middle School students can be tenacious when motivated, I've not seen many who are tenacious about finding course syllabi or assignments. If that info is not front and center, it might as well be in a black hole, and a chorus of "What's the homework?" will rise up like a symphony at the end of every class. (This is true if when the homework assignments are easily accessible!)

So implementing this as a way to organize course material for Middle School classes is probably not the ideal use. What could I use a wiki for in Middle School? It could be a great way for me to organize and collaborate on class materials with other teachers! If I share this with my teaching team and we can all access, edit and input information about what we plan to study, it could become a collaborative tool! I could also reach out to teachers teaching my subject at other schools and get feedback or input from them on what lessons might be working, or ideas for new lessons or activities!

The potential to expand my network of distributed learning is certainly there! The interface with my students is not ideal, but the idea of having 2-way digital interactions is definitely appealing, and I will certainly be opening up more digital collaboration boards for my students to make use of this year!