Friday, January 28, 2011

Wikis for Education

The second session at Recent Changes Camp 2011: Canberra
is on "Wikis for Education". This is a topic I did not think I knew much about, but realised I had run two courses were I got the students to edit the Wikipedia, one is 2007 was Writing for the Web for Local Government and the other Electronic Document Management: Course for government staff. In these I had the students edit or create a Wikipedia entry for their organisation. Government staff were reluctant to edit the Wikipedia, saying they were lot allowed to. I had to reassure them it was okay for the purposes of the course. With a little practice they became comfortable with this.

One issue which came up is open access Creative Commons type licensing for educational materials. The Austrlaian Government has adopted a policy for open access to materials, as have some state governments, particularly Queensland. Universities in Australia are government funded, but so far there is no policy requiring, or encouraging open access. There are such policies for research publishing, where open access is encouraged, but not for education.

An example of a more "open" approach is the Graduate Diploma of Education at the University of Canberra.

One tool mentioned which breaks out of the linear text model is SpicyNodes.

There was some discussion of how Moodle 2 allows integration of external tools.

No comments: