A Wiki World

I live in a wiki world as of late. There is something so appealing in knowing that people can contribute to a shared idea, have a shared voice, but that everyone can choose to work on it in her/his own time and in her/his own space. The feminist literature students seem to use our wiki really well; the Cool Trip wiki paid off big when my friend and I won the travel grant! We are now using it as a planning space for both our research for the trip and our personal thoughts about what to pack.

My latest wiki is for the entire Central staff and I am both excited and apprehensive about it. This wiki is designed as a space for the staff to continue our discussion on the book Courageous Conversations About Race. There is, again, the possibility that no one will find it useful or meaningful to use this wiki. Because this topic is so personal for me, I am more fearful of this reaction, as if it is a direct rejection of me if people choose not to participate--a choice I cannot make when it comes to discussions about race. In any case, I hope that my confession here will allow me to not take the coming reaction personally.

Stumbling Behind...

Somehow I forgot to write on my blog last week. Monitoring so many different wikis and blogs might be catching up with me because I completely forgot to write on this one! I was a little shocked with me when I discovered this. I had to write my resume in xhtml for my Internet class too last week so that took a lot of my attention as well. Anyway, what I discovered last week is StumbleUpon. It is this fun free toolbar you can download that allows you to stumble upon different websites tailored to the interests that you set. It is like browsing through the library stacks! It is really addicting!

Check it out:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Web 2.0 New Things

This week I learned about two great Web 2.0 things: WuFoo and PEERtrainer. WuFoo (named because the site founders like WuTang Clan and Foo Fighters) has online resources to create forms like interlibrary loan forms, customer satisfaction forms, even invitations. It seems as easy to use as blogs and wikis and all the forms can be edited to one's needs. You can run statistics and export the information to excel as well. It seems really useful for many different things. http://www.wufoo.com

PEERtrainer is an online site to get in shape and lose weight. You can join a group of 2-4 or an unlimited sized team. You can join chatrooms to get support and read health articles too. You can join groups that have shared common interests. They can see what you are journaling about and offer support, feedback, and/or advice. It won the Web 2.0 award in 2007 in the health category. http://www.peertrainer.com

Wiki fever

I am currently on a ship sailing to Aruba. I have taken a week off of school for this family reunion that I am at, which is exciting, but it also makes me very nervous to be gone from school--especially for the first full week of Semester Two. I started teaching Feminist Literature Quest and the beginning part of the semester is very note-heavy so I was particularly nervous to leave them. I knew I could not expect my sub, wonderful as he is, to figure out how to use the projector and present my power point presentations for the notes the students need. So, to manage my fear of leaving them without correct instruction, I created a blog for them and a wiki. On the wiki, I was able to post their notes in different sections. I showed the students before I left how to use the wiki and assigned them their homework of getting the notes from the wiki and the due dates for doing so. I can then update the wiki while I am gone and check the blog if they have questions on the notes. I can then monitor their questions from this remote access site. Of course, they can also leave questions on the wiki and via email. It sets me at ease to do this and allows me to relax and enjoy this vacation! Technology is so great!

A New Thing: Squidoo

This week I learned about Sguidoo in one of my graduate school classes where you can have your own web page on whatever you want.

* http://www.squidoo.com

There are three levels:
* g--everyone can look at it
* R--restricted
* X--sign in

General facts about Squidoo
* live 2006
* free
* Dec 2007 Google will compete with squidoo
* no spam
* can use different widgets
* can add modules (building blocks) to your lens (lens is what they call a page)
* you add tags on it for people to find it--or not
* can have an RSS feed, email that you can add to the lens
* point people to the correct place
* can track statistics of who visits squidoo site

British teachers voice concerns about plagiarism

I thought this was an interesting article about plagiarism on BBC world news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7194772.stm

The article opens with this quote:
"The 58% of 278 teachers who identified it as a problem said they thought 25% of work returned by pupils included material copied from internet sites." I wonder what the statistics would be for teachers in St. Paul.

Podcasting

I thought this was a helpful article about podcasting:

http://radio.about.com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a.htm

I hope to learn how to podcast soon. I'd love to have a session walking us through it!