Welcome to my blog! I am sure you will enjoying devouring my many pearls of wisdom as the weeks go by...
The two keys terms I took from today’s lesson and added to my mental vocabulary– collective intelligence and convergence. I was extremely engaged and fascinated in the content presented. A few points from the lesson that I would like to share:
· It was scary to learn that sites like Google actually monitor which web pages you click on from their search engines and how long a person spends on that particular page. Even scarier is that Google keep a file of your entire web browsing for period of 18 months.
· There is a side to Wikipedia that I have never looked at before. I did not know that you could view the entire history of the page to see how the page has morphed and changed over a period of time.
· It was interesting to find that Wikipedia, in comparison to Encyclopedia Britannica, is surprisingly accurate with the content of the pages.
· Most of all, I liked that the creator Wikipedia says that his favourite page is ‘List of Fictional Pigs’. This just shows that Wikipedia has a vast range of topics not covered by the standard encyclopedia.
I found it very useful to complete the discussion board exercise a few weeks ago. As Mark pointed out, Wikis and Blogs have discussions boards built into them. This blog assignment is basically an extension of the basic discussion board template (with more bells and whistles!)
Wikis in Education
I love the idea that a whole class unit could be potentially be completed online- content, discussions, final products- everything! The examples Mark presented gave me some really good ideas. I especially liked the example from the Biology class. The teacher entered the syllabus on the homepage and made links to the key terms. Students then had to, in pairs, investigate one of these topics and employed the use of the discussion board to solve any queries they had. At the end of the unit, the entire class had an accurate pool of information they could refer to for their studies. Another idea I liked was the uploading of photos, cartoon and other images for students to comment on. These comments had to be focused, for example, ‘Which photograph best represents the theme of shadow?’
On a conclusive note, I am off to investigate which Wikipage is my favourite, and see if I can add words of wisdom to any other pages. As they say, watch this space…
