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Web 2.0 Tools
Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My!
4/1/2008
The results? Kane says that student performance in general has improved tremendously over what it was before he started using the wiki. "The strategy works because it breaks those assumptions that learning is a one-way information transmission from the expert faculty to the amateur student," he says. "You've heard of the 'wisdom of crowds'? Well, this method proves that a group of 50 amateurs can learn more from each other than they can when one expert tells them everything."
At SUNY-Delhi, CIO Patrick Masson uses wikis for a different purpose: to assist in policy decision-making. Masson has implemented Confluence to establish a forum in which busy colleagues can read, exchange, review, and edit documents that pertain to certain policies and procedures. Rather than relying on a survey or top-down initiative that might be driven by executive leadership, the school is trying to create an environment where end users articulate their needs and shape the process along the way. So far, Masson says user response to this approach has been overwhelming. During a recent policy initiative, for instance, the wiki's logbook indicated that over the course of one month, the school's president made 73 edits, the coordinator of online learning made 58, the chair of budget and planning made 31, and the vice president of student housing made 29.
"There's no way I could orchestrate all of those meetings on my own," says Masson, who regularly writes about Web 2.0 and collaboration on his blog, As Much by Writing. "To me, the wiki provides not only a communications channel, but an environment that allows people to see current thinking and work together toward legitimate progress."
Recommended Reading
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Enhanced Learning/ Assessment
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: High-Performance Computing
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Interactive, Remote Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Mobile Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
