introduction to wikis and blogs in education

Pavel ZemlianskySchool of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical

Communicationzemliapx@jmu.edu

A weblog, or “blog”, is a dynamic writing and publishing tool that allows for creation, editing, commenting on, and publishing of text, images, and multimedia on the Internet.

According to another definition, a weblog “is a web site that contains brief, discrete pieces of information called posts that are arranged in reverse chronological order. A weblog can contain a wide variety of content including written essays, annotated links, documents, graphics, and multimedia.”

As personal journals. To deliver news. For reflection, invention, revision of

writing. For communication between members of

an organization.

As community builders As spaces for publication of student

projects As spaces for creation of linked and

multimedia texts As personal, learning, and reading journals As tools for invention, revision, and peer

response

The evolving nature of all web texts, including weblogs: information on the web changes quickly.

Balance between assigning formal and informal writing on student weblogs

Getting students motivated to post

Ask students to keep personal or contribute to class weblogs

Maintain balance between formality and exploration

Make sure students comment on each other’s posts

Make sure students link to each other’s posts and other sites when posting

www.blogger.com www.livejournal.com www.wordpress.com www.bloggercrab.com

Wiki bus at the Honolulu Airport

A wiki is a collaborative writing environment whose members work together on the creation of co-authored texts through joint invention, revision, and editing.

Here is a slightly more “technical” definition of wikis:

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

writing in a wiki changes things...

traditional “authority” is supplemented by “collective wisdom”

collaboration supersedes individual authorship

the whole community of readers and writers assume responsibility for the quality of a text

wikis for learning and teaching

Understand the collaborative nature of wiki projects and help students to understand it, too.

Provide detailed instructions and explanations of standards to students.

Resist the urge to go in and change student text, even if something is incorrect

Instead, encourage revision and rethinking

onward, to examples of wiki-based writing projects

Images used in this presentation are from Flickr, unless otherwise indicated.a pdf file with this presentation is available at www.pz-writing.net