Blogs And Wikis In Academia

Blogs and Wikis in Academia Engaging the World of the “Read/Write” Web Presented by Bill Warters OTL Faculty Fellow Wayne State University

Quick Check-ins • Name • University Afﬁliation • Experience as a Blogger or Wiki editor • Special Interests/Questions related to today’s session?

“Web 2.0” Described... Stephen Downes portrays it as a shift quot;from being a medium, in which information is transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content is created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed alongquot; (Downes, 2005 quot;E-Learning 2.0,quot; ¶4)

Why Does it Matter for Higher Ed?

Digital Natives & Immigrants Digital Immigrants Concept map by Michel Cartier Digital Natives Where are you on this chart?

David Warlick on Flat Classrooms “Traditional education has been an environment of hills. The teacher could rely on gravity to support the flow of curriculum down to the learners. But as much as we might like to pretend, we (teachers) are no longer on top of the hill. The hill is practically gone. For the first time in history, children are more comfortable, knowledgeable, and literate than their parents about an innovation central to society. (Tapscot) In many cases, students communicate more, construct original content more, and more often collaborate virtually with other people, than do their teachers. Those teachers who pretend to stand on higher ground, appear, to many of their students, to be standing on quicksand.” http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/04/10/flat-classrooms/

The Flattening Classroom

Renovating the Ivory Tower Higher Ed Cartoon by Rand Renfroe

School 1.0

School 2.0

Web 2.0 = More Engaged Learning?

Learning Design Going Forward? KM is a Key Competency New Tools and Processes Image by Bebo White

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Wikis • A Wiki is a website • “Wiki” means fast in that allows users to Hawaiian. freely create and edit • Authors do not Web page content, always claim usually in a Web ownership of jointly browser. constructed texts. • Wikis use simple • Wikis provide a formatting rules-- history and anyone Like word processing. can revisit prior • Wikis are published versions of text. online.

Wikis “In Plain English” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

A Source of Educational Content • Wikipedia Sample Student • http://en.wikipedia.org Assignment: 1) Look up • Wikiversity something in the Wikipedia • http://en.wikiversity.org 2) Do more • Wikibooks Research to Prove it is Correct • http://en.wikibooks.org • Guidelines for class projects • WSU Class book-writing example

Wikipedia Contributors Regular Contributors to Wikipedia (10 or more edits) 300,000 276,615 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,834 100,000 50,000 30,817 6,005 1,103 156 01 02 03 04 05 06 20 20 20 20 20 20

How Do Educators Use a Wiki?

Some Wiki Activities • A wiki “fan zine” for you favorite author. • A virtual tour of your university. • Collaborative book reviews or author studies. • A course “encyclopedia” on a special topic. • A Wikibook created by a class or group

Free Hosted Wiki Tools • Easy Places for Getting Started: • Wikispaces • Pbwiki • Seedwiki • Wetpaint

Wiki Matrix Comparison Tool http://www.wikimatrix.org/ 97 Wiki Platforms and Counting

Wiki Editing Syntax Internal Links: CamelCaseLink or [quot;free linkquot;] • Wikitext language or wiki markup is a markup language that offers a simpliﬁed alternative to HTML and is used to write pages in wiki websites • Not standardized. Some tools now offer WYSIWYG editors Headlines Format Examples !!!Headline1 h1. Top Level Heading = Headline 1 = !!Headline2 h2. Smaller Heading == Headline 2 == !Headline3 h6. Smallest Heading === Headline 3 ===

PBWiki - an Educator Friendly Starting Place http://xtremeweek.pbwiki.com

Overview of PBwiki Interface and Tools

Wiki Best Practice Ideas • Discuss ThreadMode vs DocumentMode writing styles As per the MeatBall Wiki, DocumentMode (typically unsigned, using authoritative voice) “looks like this: Foo is preferable to quuz as a metasyntactic variable because it is shorter and uses the F character, which is earlier in the alphabet than Q and thus better. There are heretics who recommend quuz, but as they are obviously zealots, we can safely ignore them. Rather than this (ThreadMode): I think foo is better than quuz --SomeBody Well, you're wrong. Quuz is far superior. I know because I say. --SomebodyElse ”

Wiki Best Practice Ideas • 1. Make use of features that alert a wiki manager that changes have been made to the wiki. Check regularly to see what changes have been made and by whom. Perhaps assign someone to watch for spam. • 2. Determine whether your wiki should be accessible to the public or be limited to a deﬁned group. Perhaps start private, and go public when the work is more developed. • 3. Be aware of copyright and licensing issues when posting other people’s work. as per “Wiki Wisdom: Lessons for Educators” by Michelle R. Davis http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2007/09/12/02wiki.h01.html

Wiki Best Practice Ideas • 4. Emphasize “digital professionalism” to the community, remind users that it is a document many other people will see. Talk about and make clear what is, and is not, acceptable on the wiki. • Consider providing a Style Manual . See this example from Bemidji State http://snipurl.com/wikistylemanual • 5. Especially when using wikis with young students, take steps to prevent users from posting personal information that would reveal their identities.

Try Editing A Page? http://xtremeweek.pbwiki.com/ Editing Password is “wsu”

Blogs in Academia Image from http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/

Blogs in a Nutshell

A Blog is... • A shortened form of the phrase “Web Log” • Like a ship’s log written daily by the captain of a vessel. • A web site that is easily updated by posting short items. • Ordered by date and topic, with newest items at the top. • Often archived for searching and reading later.

Some Typical Blog Features • Comments - now comment spam is becoming a problem • Feeds - others can subscribe to your Blog and read it in a newsreader of their choice • Trackbacks - “pinging” system lets you know when others have commented on your post at their site (use is dropping) • Categories/Tags - often overlapping • Site Search • Permanent Archives - and “permalinks” • Blogroll listing of other related blogs

Blog Content includes • News and Journalism • Education/Pedagogy • Analysis • Humor • Personal Observation and Opinion • “Annotated Bookmarks” • and More...

Topical Examples Politics Medicine Local Story- Photos telling

Topical Examples Sports Cooking Library- Music related

Blog Growth Report Th Tec e S hn tat ora e o ti R • 70 million weblogs Ap f th ep ril e L or 20 ive t 07 We • About 120,000 new weblogs each b day, or... • 1.4 new blogs per second • 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day • Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December

Impressive Blog Growth & Posting Rates 60 Million 2 Million Mar 03 Oct 06

Impressive Growth & Posting Rates Aug 04 Nov 05 Feb 07

Easy to Use! Demonstration of Adding a Post in a WordPress Blog

Wiki Listing of Academic Blogs http://wiki.henryfarrell.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Some Uses of Blogs by Faculty & Instructors • Content-related blog posts (often longer) as professional practice • Networking and personal knowledge sharing among peers • Research Diary tracking project progress • Source of Instructional Tips for students • Course Announcements and Readings • Annotated links • Knowledge management (outboard brain)

Blog Research Diary Topics • An initial entry that discusses general research interests. • A statement and reﬁnement of the research question. • A preliminary research strategy. • Notes on sources. • Observations. • Free writing. Discovering the focus of the research. • Formal writing. • Presentation. http://edtech.tennessee.edu/%7Eset31/04_05.htm

Higher Ed Online Conference http://www.higheredblogcon.com

Topical “Blog Carnivals” http://blogcarnival.com/bc/

Doctoral Student Blogs http://www.PHDweblogs.net

WSU Example: Bill’s Library InterOp Project Blog

Blog Use with Students • Reﬂective or writing journals • Knowledge management • Assignment submission and review • Dialogue in groupwork • E-portfolios • Share course-related resources or lecture/unit summaries

Example: WSU Student Directed Study

WSU Example - Mame Jackson’s Service Learning Class

SoTL Project Blogs

WSU Teaching and Learning Blog http://cgi.lib.wayne.edu/blog/otl/

Free Blogs for Educators and Students

EduBlogs http://edublogs.org/ Learnerblogs.org for K-12 students Edublogs.org for teachers and trainers Uniblogs.org for university students Eslblogs.org for ESL students

EduBlogs Intro Video

Other Free Blog Hosts Blogger.com Wordpress.com Good List of 40+ Services http://mashable.com/2007/08/06/free-blog-hosts/

Blogs (and Wikis) are Built into Moodle

Nice Academic Blogging Learning Module http://edtech.tennessee.edu/~set31/ Reviews Different Uses of Blogs

Managing Your Blog “Reading List”

RSS Explained http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

RSS for Educators Explained in a PDF Lots of Examples and Ideas for Use in Teaching • RSS Ideas for Educators.pdf • Quentin D'Souza shares many tools and links via TeachingHacks.com • See the Web 2.0 Wiki he’s got going http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/

One Day on the WWW... http://www.teachinghacks.com/wp-content/ uploads/2006/01/rsscomic11a.pdf

Behold The Aggregator!

aka RSS Reader

Behold The Aggregator!

Demonstration of Bloglines Aggregator http://www.bloglines.com

Some Blog Research Tools • http://technorati.com/widgets (lots of tools) • Technorati Charts http://technorati.com/chart/[yourtopic] • http://www.Blogdigger.com • http://blogsearch.google.com/ • http://www.icerocket.com/

Interested in Learning More? • Online “Course” on • Links to Lots more Emerging ideas Technologies for Scholars • “Blog to Teach, Teach to Blog” Course http://tools.comm.wayne.edu/moodle/course/category.php?id=5

http://comm.wayne.edu	120
http://www.comm.wayne.edu	44
http://www.slideshare.net	5
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	4
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	4
https://cms.wayne.edu	3
http://www.linkedin.com	1
http://www.comm.wayne.edu.	1
http://192.168.10.100	1
http://navigator.nmc.org	1

Blogs And Wikis In Academia

by Bill Warters

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

10 Embeds 184

Statistics

Blogs And Wikis In Academia Presentation Transcript