Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My!

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Web 2.0 Tools

Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My!

4/1/2008

By Matt Villano

Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My! Web 2.0 tools sure are nifty and 'next-gen,' but are they actually making a difference in the way students and educators collaborate?

Everyone seems to have a different definition for "Web 2.0," but most people agree the phrase describes a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services that aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. Technically speaking, these new technologies include blogs, wikis, folksonomies (collaborative or social tagging), and social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us.

In the business world, these technologies enable colleagues in different offices to work together on projects, and thus move those efforts ahead quickly and more easily than traveling to an in-person meeting or even teleconferencing. In higher education, however, achieving measurable results with these tools is a bit more challenging. And maybe that's because-for the academic community, at least-questions continue to swirl around the use of these technologies. Questions such as: What do these tools bring to the table? How can educators be certain students will use them? How does restructuring a curriculum around Web 2.0 actually make a difference in how students learn? Across the country, as more and more colleges and universities consider embracing Web 2.0, the educators and technologists involved feel a certain amount of trepidation, and even ponder the future of the movement.

Yet, a handful of schools are starting to figure things out. For instance, at Boston College (MA), the State University of New York-Delhi, Lake Superior College (MN), Grand Rapids Community College (MI), and Bentley College (MA), technologists recently have adopted Web 2.0 tools in an effort to improve collaboration. What works at these schools? Following are examples of Web 2.0 components and tools-and the techniques being employed to foster their successful use-that you should consider before moving forward with your own campus initiative.

Wonderful Wikis

Without question, the wiki is the Web 2.0 tool most commonly used by educators and higher ed technologists to facilitate collaboration. Among the more popular offerings: web-based wiki services from vendors such as PBwiki, Socialtext, and Atlassian (maker of the Confluence product).

AT BOSTON COLLEGE, Professor Kane encourages students to submit their own exam questions via his Exam Question Workspace wiki. In a year, students submitted a whopping 600 questions overall.

At Boston College, at least one educator is all about Socialtext. Jerry Kane, assistant professor of information systems for the Carroll School of Management, has used the product to develop an online community he calls the Exam Question Workspace. Throughout the semester, Kane encourages students to log on to the wiki to suggest exam questions and respond to questions other students have submitted. Before each assessment, he goes into the workspace and selects the toughest questions to include on his tests. Since Kane started using the workspace a year ago, he says students have submitted a whopping 600 questions overall; he estimates that he's pulled 80 to 90 percent of his exam questions from the wiki. Students, he reports, see the workspace as a good place to home in on important facts, so they study material on the wiki religiously, essentially working together to improve their collective knowledge. Interestingly, from the get-go, Kane tells students that there's no guarantee the answers on the site are correct. Instead, he insists that they must be "responsible consumers of the tool" and "fix answers they find to be wrong."