Educational Communications & Technology :: A newish weblog from Rick Schwier, one of my profs in the Educational Communication and Technology program at the University of Saskatchewan. The archives aren’t quite figured out yet (maybe I should enlighten him about TypePad!) but he had an interesting post about wikis and blogs in education (coming from AECT ’03 in Anaheim):
Well, I can come home now. The conference has already paid off. I saw one of the best sessions yet on using Blog and Whiki tools in education. I think that I’m going to move this Blog to a new location and we’re going to turn up the heat under it. Dave Wiley from Utah State University and Trey Martindale (sounds like a romance novel character, don’t you think?) from East Carolina University took us on a tour of weblog and wiki technology and the ways they’re using it. Sounds like just another show and tell session, right?
Wrong.
They are actually heavily involved in the open source movement generally, and they’re using Blogs to do everything from posting student journals and research idea forums to actually collaborating on classes that are co-taught at the same time in Georgia and Utah. They talked about ways to replace course delivery technologies like WebCT and Blackboard with Weblogs. What I loved is that it meets my two biggest criteria:
1. it is easy
2. it is freeWhen you factor in RSS (really simple syndication) as a way to publish your stuff, and use aggregators to gather everything that qualifies as your favourite stuff into one weblink, the tools become extremely powerful. There really is an amazing community of scholars developing through the open source movement about new ways to use blogs. They’re more than the ramblings of, say, a demented professor communcating with his students from, say, California while they are having a latte in the U of S buffeteria.
Oh yeah – blogging and wikiing (if that is the correct verb) hit the academic mainstream!