Wiki's

Our second post on the MBSW Learning Technologies blog will explain Wiki's.

Once again we will first take a look at the definition given by Wikipedia

'A wiki (IPA: [?w?.ki?] or [?wi?.ki?] [1]) is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and the online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.'

The benefits of a Wiki is that they can be used as collaborative software between many users and the information is then available to the greater population via the internet.

Some of the education uses of Wiki's can be found below:-

1)Teamwork and collaboration, If learning is indeed a social activity, wiki's afford an opportunity for the social construction of knowledge where students and teachers are not simply engaged in developing their own information but actively involved in creating knowledge that will benefit other students.

2) Wiki's can be used for group projects, taking collaborative notes, creating shared lesson plans , creating presentations , creating study guides, creating books.

The possibilities for using wiki's in education are only limited by one's imagination and time.

Some free hosted wiki sites are listed below :-
WikiDot, PBWiki, Wikihost

Blogs

Our first post on this learning technology blog is about Blogs.

First a definition from Wikipedia

'Blog is the contraction universally used for weblog, a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order.
Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.
The word blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.'

Blogs can be useful for recording information and disseminating that information to a global population.

In the learning technology world blogs can be useful for several things. From a students perspective blogs can be useful for creating personal reflective journals, allowing the student to reflect on their work, or maybe as a knowledge management tool to help them collate and manage their own learning experience. Another use of a blog for the student might be as a group discussion or co-ordination tool allowing the student to engage and disseminate group work. And one final use might be if a student wanted to build up an e-portfolio of work.

From the Instructor's point of view blogs are useful for disseminating information to students such as tips on coursework or disseminating course information to students or maybe for the instructor to stay current with the information in their field.

Blogs are a very useful tool , for me personally I read lots and lots of blogs everyday by using the RSS feed feature that most blogs contain, it allows me to stay up to date with information current to my field of research (Learning Technology) as most colleagues in the same field have blogs and publish on them regularly.

There are many free blogging services available on the web, the most popular being Blogger.com, others include EduBlogs, Gaggle, DA Blogs.