Terry’s Blog

I am using a free hosted wiki system called JotSpot at http:www.jot.com. It is extremely limited in its free version but good enough to explore and evaluate the various features. I’ll post on this separately and list the features which I suspect are pretty impressive. It is my first experience of using a wiki system and as such will become my baseline for evaluating others. I think the wiki function that is part of the Elgg community setup could be extremely useful; especially if it can be restricted to the members of the community.

I have set a wiki up to support a Sociology of the Environment UG module I teach. At the moment it is highly structured with sections for module documentation, lecture notes and a page of links to useful and relevant websites. It is so far disappointingly similar to what I offer the students in our VLE. In the VLE I have set up a discussion room but it has never been entirely satisfactory. I have an idea that the pages of lecture notes in the wiki will be modified and added to by the students and myself and between us we will more-or-less rewrite the lectures dynamically in the light of additional points made, requests for clarification, suggested links to other resources and topics, and so on. I have this vague idea that it would be good if the students could specify and write the module themselves, even have a say in designing essay titles and examination questions perhaps. In this way it would really engage with their own interests and concerns. And given the usual instrumental focus on assessment, it might be a real motivator.

But this may be just unrealistic wishful thinking. I will be interested to see what turns up in the wiki attached to the new usecases weblog http://elgg.net/usecases/weblog/recently set up.

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