At the end of the article by Tim O’Reilly, states that two of the major competencies of Web 2.0 companies are that they provide a service and allow the users to become co-developers. As a teacher I try to set my high school classes of Civics and Economics up to run like a college level class. With in both of these classes are very large projects that become a substantial amount of the student’s grades. After working on the Wiki site that we were to set up this week, I have come to the conclusion that it would be a very useful tool for both me and the students during these projects. Not only will it make the conveying of information to be easier for the students to get a hold of, it will allow them to make suggestions and fix certain aspects of the project. I believe that when the students are given a chance to make constructive input into a project, a lot of great ideas I would have never thought of flow out.
The project that I have my Civics class work on is the creation of a political party. Within the party the groups have to come up with different stances on platform issues such as government spending, health care reform, and state/local issues. With the help of a Wiki page, I could set up a page for each individual platform that the students could access. Each page on the Wiki could then have links to websites, videos, or other valuable information that could help the groups come to a decision on where they stand on that particular issue. The other valuable aspect of the Wiki is that the students could add to the construction with the information that they have found throughout the project on their own. By allowing them to add on to the page the pool of information at the finger tips of others grows. In a way the Wiki will allow the students to create a type of social networking website that has an educational purpose to help others with necessary information.
The project in my Economics class would follow a very similar scenario as the Civics project. The only real difference would be that the subject matter is Personal Finance. For this project, the Wiki would act as more of an organizer, rather than an information portal. Part of the project is for the students to keep track of three different companies on the stock market. If the students were allowed access to edit the Wiki to add their stock information every week they could check in how the companies of others are doing in the class. Over the past three years of doing this project, I have found that many of the students start to become very competitive and involved in the project based off of what their stocks are doing. The ability of the Wiki to condense the information might push that drive in some students a little more.
For me as a teacher I value the input of the students, as I have stated above, and I want to know how to improve the project for future classes. The Wiki could be that tool that makes the whole processes easy on me. I would no longer have to have the students write a paper of suggestions because I could just have them post their ideas, links, videos, or other information to the Wiki. Allowing the Wiki to grow over time and become a valuable resource for the class.
The last thought I have about the Wiki as a technology tool is that it seems to be a blog with a lot more components to it. I know that O’Reilly stated that both the Wiki and blog are part of the Web 2.0 movement, but looking at it these two compare as much as the idea of Netscape and Google. Both of the tools can post links, pictures, videos, etc., but the Wiki allows for the information to be organized and changed. While a blog is more of a journal format and can be present within a Wiki itself. In the end, I was left with the feeling that a Wiki was sort of like a blog on a major dose of steroids.
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