Week 2 - Collaboration and Learning in a Virtual Environment

When students and teachers are learners who use collaboration as part of the learning process they make good use of both the expertise of the instructor and the learning potential of the students as a group.   A simple and quick technology tool which allows participants to add, edit and delete information on a certain topic is known as a wiki.  Integrating wikis into the learning process can be either private or public.  Public wiki’s are wikis in their truest form while private wikis give more control and procedures for collaboration. Wikis can be used to collect or summarize data or results, to show competence or reflective thoughts on a specific topic, and to plan, answer questions, show a timeline progression in an environment or project Wiki’s are hosted on free, fee-based or self hosted.  PBworks.com is a hosting site for wikis that serves education by catering to classroom teachers, librarians, universities.  In addition to reflecting on our classroom learning via a weekly blog post and tweeting on Twitter, we will begin planning and designing the skills and behaviors for our own wiki collaboration project. 

West, J. A., & West, M. L. (2009). Using Wikis for Online Collaboration : The Power of The Read-Write Web (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Week One - Collaboration and Learning in a Virtual Environment.

Week One - Collaboration in a virtual environment

During week one of EDU651 we spent time analyzing The 2009 Horizon Report.  Each member of our class determined The 2009 Horizon Report's strenghts, threats, weaknesses and opportunities.  We learned all about different teaching technology tools such as web blogs and wiki's and how  they can be used in the classroom.  I am looking forward to planning and using a wiki.  I  like the idea of collaboration without the pressure of asking forthright questions and demanding students to produce expected answers or results. Wiki's give students the opportunity to reflect on their learning and share ideas.  Students can post classroom projects, share links and track their learning.   Bookmarking sites provides students assess to favorite sites from any computer anywhere that has ïnternet access.  The final assignment for the week was to summarize our reading and respond to specific components such as how to safely use technology tools to expand the walls of the traditional classroom.