Web 2.0 Week 5 - Wikis and Online Productivity

Wikis
A wiki is just a collaborative website that allow many people to contribute to editing its contents. Wiki is named after the Hawaiian word for "quick." A single page is a wiki page, and the links and pages collectively make up the wiki. Some wikis allow for postings from the general public, and some require accounts and authentication. The latter type of wiki would be safer for public school children to use.

Wikis provide a means of verifying the validity of their content. They provide some means of error correction. A wiki is collective intelligence in which individual users create, correct, and change the content. Wikis are transactional, they are in a constant state of change as the collective knowledge grows.

Online productivity:
Basically, online productivity tools such as Google Docs are like having the MS Office suite online. I used to use MS Word's collaboration function when I had my fifth graders go through the drafting, revising and editing phases of Writer's Workshop. Word could track changes and you could insert comments for your partners to access. The great part about this was that kids could be paired up with kids in other classess, and they didn't have to meet in "real time."

With Google Docs, users can collaborate in real-time. With as tech-saavy as I am, I'm just not comfortable with that real-time part yet. I like turn-taking and letting someone finish writing their thoughts and then having time to process the information before responding. Nothing was quite as frustrating for me than participating in the "chat" portion of my Master's program. Someone would have a really great suggestion that sparked an idea for me, but someone else on the team would get their comment out there first and everything I was typing for the past minute or two was pretty much worthless.

It is a matter of retraining my brain to process information and to correspond/communicate with others more quickly. I am able to juggle many projects in a relatively short amount of time, such as teaching multiple levels of students during a lesson or planning lessons, printing out data, and analyzing student test scores within my 50-minute planning, but I am not truly multitasking. Kids today who can to real-time collaboration are actually multitasking. It boggles the mind.

I will be exploring Google Docs more. I had to get those personal biases and the negative presumptions out of the way first!