This Wiki Stuff Gets Easier and Easier

Thursday, 22 March 2007 Clay Burell Print This Post

Confession: I’m behind in my unit planning for history. I’m doing too much administrative stuff to stay abreast of my course-work.

But an interesting thing just happened. Faced with a history class in 2 hours and no unit plan for World War I to World War II, I found myself setting up a new Wikispace–”A Broken World“–and designing a project for a student-created online textbook, complete with embedded student video lectures and Skypecast interviews with academic experts–and it took me all of 30 minutes.

I really think that this project will be self-sustaining for the next three weeks or so, requiring little further planning for me.

I also think the students will learn much more, and enjoy that learning more as well, than if I had created discrete lessons for the whole unit.

This is only my third or fourth wiki project. The French Revolution Wikipedia and Ant Farm Diaries was, judging by student feedback, a success–but an imperfect and exhausting one for us all. The 1000 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop for my English class has also been engaging for students and teachers, but again, high-maintenance (we’re working those bugs out, though).

But this online textbook wiki? It seems like a new plateau in simplicity and design. I hope I’m not deceived. Take a snoop and tell me what you think–and steal at will (though be a nice thief and let me know how things go, and any improvements you make).

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Tags: collaboration, history, information literacy, literacy, multimedia, podcasting, reading, research, student 2.0, teaching, textbooks, video, web 2.0/ read-write web, wiki Print This Post

The entry 'This Wiki Stuff Gets Easier and Easier' was posted on March 22nd, 2007 at 5:05 pm and last modified on January 8th, 2008 at 6:07 pm, and is filed under history, project-based learning, teaching, web2.0, wiki, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “This Wiki Stuff Gets Easier and Easier”

Diane writes:
No. 1 — March 22nd, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Hmmm…so you’re telling us that you set up the framework and now the students will be doing the learning work? How very 21st century of you!

Reply
Barbara writes:
No. 2 — March 23rd, 2007 at 9:01 am
Very nice …I will be sharing this as part of my textbook discussion. I will probably borrow it too and as we “mix and remix” we may have a kind of template that will serve many classes.

On another subject to further extend the blog conversation if you have not done so you may want to look at these to articles by Jeff…
I can’t seem yo get the link yo work in the comment but here is the url for the article which also has a link to the first article-
http://www.techlearning.com/blog/
2007/03/a_problem_with_blogs_contd.php

They raise an interesting perspective on blogs as conversations. Something I actually have been thinking about.

Reply
A Short, Strange Trip into the 21st Century, Part 1 (guest post by Clay Burell) » Moving at the Speed of Creativity writes:
No. 3 — March 1st, 2008 at 9:48 pm
[...] companion blog: This unit was a collaboration only between my two world history classes. As this thinkaloud explains, it took minimal planning and labor due to its simplicity: students adapted their paper [...]
Enda writes:
No. 4 — May 15th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Please congratulate your students on a great piece of work.

Reply
The Teacher’s Dilemma-Content Delivery vs Understanding « Less Chalk More Talk writes:
No. 5 — February 27th, 2009 at 9:07 am
[...] last link: This post is I think the best answer to the problem I’ve come up [...]
Education - Change.org: Teach Broad, or Teach Deep? Coverage versus Depth writes:
No. 6 — March 2nd, 2009 at 7:17 am
[...] Tom, This post is I think the best answer to the problem I’ve come up with.Let me know what you [...]