After spending the afternoon messing around with wikis, I'm intrigued by their potential. I think they could really foster some great collaboration between kids. I can see doing a project in 9th grade science where I would pair up kids not in the same class and they would have to create a wiki page/space together on a specific topic. Their main mode of communication would be the wiki. I like the idea of introducting my students to some new things on the computer instead of having them do the same stuff all the time i.e. power points, videos, papers, etc. Even though I was at first a bit intimidated by the wiki space, I found it to be fairly user friendly and I don't think kids would find it difficult to use.
My students this past year used wikipedia quite often when researching a project, which frustrated me to no end. I realize that I need to spend some time showing them exactly what a wiki is and why it really shouldn't be used in a high school for research. Perhaps if they have the opportunity to work on a wiki of their own, they will realize how skeptical you should be of information gathered from it, given the 'open' nature of the articles. I guess this boils down to the idea of instilling academic rigor in my students... holding themselves to high level of academic integrity.
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What I feel we need to instill in the students is a skepticism of ALL resources (printed, online, professional, amateur) and the skills to validate/confirm what they find.
Wikispaces can be useful to give you an idea of what something even is, and direct you to some other sources ... but the students (and we) need to know how to go about confirming what we find.
I an excited about Wikispaces in general. I plan to use them for ePortfolios. The student will be able to pretty much free-form create their Wikispace allowing for individualism and creativity. I will have a Wikispace that keeps a grid of the deliverables ... they can edit my Wikispace by pasting a link to where in their portfolio the standard is demonstrated. (This is my current thinking.)
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