Still Behind the Times

One of my assistant principals recently sent me an article about young students using a wiki to publish poetry. It discussed several points that I believe about how to "raise the stakes" in student work:

1. Publish to a wider audience. By having students publish their work on the internet, it becomes work that will be seen by more than just themselves and the teacher. If they know a larger audience is going to read it, they will invest more time and energy into letting it represent what they can do.
2. Allow students to critique themselves and others. Wikis naturally lend themselves to group collaboration, and students can comment on each other's work. They can also revise their work, and review those revisions to see how their work has progressed.
3. Make open-ended assignments. The article makes reference to the teacher allowing students to add to their class poetry whenever they want. If students have home internet access, they can add to the wiki from there; they could also do in the classroom, the school or public library, etc.

While I applaud The Boston Globe for the article and the teacher for using the technology to enhance the students' learning, I'm a bit disappointed that this type of classroom behavior is considered news-worthy. Not that it isn't a story worth telling - it's just that, ideally, it would commonplace enough that it wouldn't have to be reported in the news.

Ward Cunningham invented WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and while no one expects schools to adopt new technology right away, fifteen-year-old technology seems tried and true enough that it should get plenty of use in schools.

I know that there are plenty of teachers using wikis for teaching - why aren't there more, I'd like to know? If we're talking about 21st century schooling, shouldn't this kind of collaboration be commonplace now?

Posted in: 21st century classroom, collaboration, learning, students, teaching, web 2.0, wikis