Thing 22

My Wikispace is http://wagarmsbands.wikispaces.com/ but be forewarned: I don't like it. In fact, I wouldn't be making the site public unless requested to. Basically, it's the result of me playing around, learning the site, and it doesn't look like much compared to the websites I've created and maintained over the past five years. I found Wikispaces a little more difficult to use than I expected. The text formatting didn't turn out quite right and it seemed somewhat cumbersome to make changes. My district is currently using NexusBuilder for our teacher websites, which was easier for me to get a more professional-looking result upon first use. Prior to that, I used Publisher for my site, which was less flashy but again, seemingly easier to manage. More practice would likely make Wikispaces more intuitive; that, or a knowledge of html code, which might have helped me solve my design problems.

That said, I still struggle to find a purpose for a wiki space in my classroom. There just doesn't seem to be a pressing need for it. I can see it as a way to present info from our bio projects or comment on the process of preparing a piece for performance, but we're doing these things already in a lower-tech way and there doesn't seem to be a huge advantage to switch as of yet. Doing so would necessitate giving up a lot of rehearsal time since the only location everyone is guaranteed to have a computer is here at school.

In terms of how a wiki differs from a blog, it's more difficult for me to articulate how a wiki differs from a website except to say that there are multiple contributors. Blogs seem to usually (although not always) be the work of one person, as are traditional web pages. I think the choice of what to use depends on what the intended end result of the project is. A wiki seems like a great choice if it is a collaborative project, when many parts are added together to form a whole, and when contributors need a certain amount of independence to work on their parts from various places and at different times. A webpage would require the individuals to submit to a designated editor, who would then have the responsibility for publication. A blog seems more sequential; a wiki more flexible in terms of how to organize content. I'll be interested in what others say about this topic. Maybe that's it...with a wiki, we'd all be writing in the same spot!