For the past few weeks, I’ve been looking into wikis for a presentation that I have coming up this week and as I’ve read about them, I kept seeing the WikiSpaces drive to get k-12 teachers to use wikis. I always thought that this would be a great idea, but I didn’t know how great until I was talking to a prof yesterday who wanted to find some way to get his largely overhead/copy based course that is constantly evolving (it has elements of exploration and he updates the course often according to what has happened on various “missions”) organized in some manner that he could cull the chaff and keep only the wheat.
At first I was thinking something like WebCT or Moodle, but then I thought about what he really would want to do to get everything organized. He wanted to be able to hide extra detail, but have it available if needed and he wanted to be able to do all this in a way that he could understand the process. So I figured that using content files or a course wiki in Moodle would not be the idea way to go about what essentially amounts to document management. So, enter the wiki.
My plan is to help him scaffold and organize his lectures and based on what the talking points of the lecture is, spawn off additional pages in the wiki. This way the cost of entry is rather low and the change in workflow is minimal as much of what he has is already in some manner of electronic file (the class is presented with overheads and copies). With any luck, this should work out well.
Just a thought, I think rather than encourage the presentation side to be more tech heavy, we encourage the prep side, we can get better results faster.
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