Stewart Mader Wiki Talk at Drexel

Drexel CoAS E-Learning Lecture Series
Time: 11:00 Thursday October 26, 2006
Location: Disque 109

See recording here.

Four Letter Words: How wiki and edit are making the Internet a better learning tool

Stewart Mader, Senior Instructional Technologist, Life Sciences and Brown Medical School, Brown University

A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person's course materials. I'll show how using the wiki has improved collaboration and data collection in several courses, and transformed a well-known science education website by allowing the teachers who use it to collaboratively author and edit its content. Participants will also learn about the range of wiki tools available, from free, web-based tools to enterprise solutions that can serve an entire digital campus. I'll also discuss my recently released wiki-based book, Using Wiki in Education, which is a compilation of case studies showing how teachers are using the wiki in a variety of environments.