Wikis in My Classroom

A particular interesting use of wikis in education is that of creating online "textbooks." California is working on an Open Source Textbook Project (http://www.opensourcetext.org/) and South Africa has their entire high school curriculum in a wiki (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum). Because the content in my computer programming courses changes rapidly, I'm considering creating a wiki for a textbook supplement that students and I can all update as necessary.

My first experience with creating a wiki project as a group has gone quite well. We are not completely finished but the discussion section of the wiki makes it easy to work out the plans and creating the wiki itself is simple. Links are easy to add and the most challenging part was trying not to spend too much time searching for interesting related media. Once I got on YouTube and got distracted by off-topic videos, I could have spent many unproductive hours there!

I have used Wikipedia for a few years and it has proven to be a fairly reliable resource on most topics that I have read about. I will continue to use it and think it is a valuable tool and also understand that, due to its open-source creation, all information is not always valid and I need to make that distinction when I use it.

Since I have not yet added wiki creation to my courses I'm not sure if I will encounter resistance. I doubt it. The majority of my students are more technically advanced than the average teenager (which is already more advanced than us non-teenagers!) and I believe that they will enjoy the experience and the collaborative effort it will entail.