Thing 21

Forgive the lapse in order... I didn't have iTunes at school yet had time to work on the 23 Things project, so out of order it is.

There wasn't a particular wiki that inspired me to go out and create my own, but browsing others' efforts expanded my understanding of what exactly a wiki is, and what it can potentially be. Prior to today, my definition of wiki was the prefix to wikipedia. I knew Wikipedia wasn't the only wiki out there, but hadn't seen many and thought of them as essentially a group-edited reference source (www.windrep.org is a particularly relevant example of this type). After visiting the suggested sites, I realized that online encyclopedia was too narrow a definition; they have a lot in common with traditional webpages too, with the advantage of multiple contributors (the Arbor Heights Elementary wiki seemed like a starting step to transform a webpage into a wiki). The sites done by students, and especially those that were collaborative projects between kids in different countries, were a cool way to demonstrate and share learning. The pen pal projects I remember from elementary school seem positively archaic in comparison.

I think it would be fairly simple to change my class website to a wiki, although I'm not sure the audience is really there to justify the effort. There are more significant challenges to creating a student-contributor/editor wiki. One is the familiar have/have not question: who has access to this technology? Confining the project to school hours only offers a solution, but the time involved would come at the expense of the main objective of my class--learning and experiencing music through playing an instrument. Copyright issues are also a consideration. Say we did do a wiki that was focused on analyzing and improving a set of repertoire for an upcoming performance: posting the audio file could potentially violate copyright. Lastly, it may be important to definine the scope of individual student responsibility. In the imaginary wiki above I can easily see certain students regularly contributing and others preferring not to...I can also see a discussion veering off into arguments about which sections messed up, a varient of the "too many cooks" problem. If everyone had their own specific task as well as guidelines for contributing and editing, I imagine this would be less of a problem.

At this point, I don't see a strong need or a simple way to authentically integrate a wiki into my classroom...but I see we'll be starting one for Thing 22, so I'll be giving it some additional thought!