Wacky wikis

I used a wiki for the first time this past spring term. I felt my Advanced Writing Workshop students needed to learn about professional writing for Web 2.0, and I figured it would be better for THEM to do the research than for me to do it and give it to them. So the students brainstormed various topics--professional writing for Facebook was the most popular!--and divided them up. Then they did some web research on the topics and created wiki pages for each one. First they just dumped their info on the page; later, I had them integrate and synthesize the material so it wasn't just a patchwork.

That last part was the hardest: synthesizing all the material. Students seem to think if they find, copy, and paste material, they've "researched" it. Always has been that way, but web 2.0 makes that process really easy. Synthesizing the material is still hard. I need to think more about how I conduct that assignment if I do it again so that it's not just a patchwork of cut and paste.

I use Wikipedia as a "first source" when I'm finding out about something I know nothing about. Like pop culture!

In the clouds!

I enjoyed thinking about Web 2.0 apps I use this week. There's one other I just found out about this year--from Lisa--it's Piknik, which allows you to edit photos very easily. My students in journalism used it for our web stories.

As for Google Docs, I'm not crazy about it. It does something funny to the formatting, which is often an important part of documents I'm working on (syllabi, etc). Also, until recently, I guess, it didn't want to upload docx files. It seems to do that now.

But I am going to use it today! I started on an assignment for a fall class yesterday at Coe, and will work on it from home today.

As for the other apps, ScribD was interesting. Nice that the site allows users to categorize the docs so that other like-minded writers/readers can find it. But probably they don't, unless they're looking for it, or it's somehow viral.

Like most of the rest of the web, there's no editor, so anything can get published--a good and bad thing. I like the idea that you can use it for civic participation like the city of Marion did.

I couldn't get logged on to Zoho with my Google account, so didn't get to explore that one too much.