May 29 2007
Is a Wiki addictive…..
The Wiki project over at CICT Wiki is gathering pace especially in its final week of implementation. It has been noticeable that the interaction with the site and wiki has developed as this content being researched and developed has become more and more organised – it almost took a time to reach a critical mass before the students started to believe in the power of what could be produced.
Now students are much more involved at home, is this another addiction like the social networking/facebook addiction that is dominating teenage lives at the moment. I can see how all Read/ Write applications and media have that pull power as you are able to see immediate changed and make a difference. However small or large that difference might be. As the article from the Washington Post suggests “Sometimes wikis don’t click. But at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive.”
It is interesting also to see with the introduction of the Clustrmap and the competitive edge that was produced through my assessment strategy, students have been peer reviewing each others work in a very natural. Over a Meatball Wiki, they discuss the idea of the reason a Wiki seems at times to be addictive to certain members of a community. That is an interesting idea as even though the CICT wiki has been controlled from afar by myself, students can see that I have very much only set broad areas of research and have never changed any of their words, presentation elements etc, but have only added comments about how they could improve their research and wiki-pages. However according to the Meatball wiki I might actually be considered a Wiki neuterer:- “But, wiki only creates addicts where the wiki is open and not strangled by overbearing bullies and self-appointed censors. When that happens, wiki becomes a wiki-addict-neuterer”. I wonder if this is the case, or within any educational environment this has to be the case within reason?
Close down happens this Thursday at 12:00p.m. and I believe that even before then what started as a little experiment is something I will take forward and use again, specifically with the new ITGS course I will be teaching. The one remaining question is how to assess and ensure students are taking in everything they are researching and also what others are researching.
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