Chapters 4 and 5 from Richardson's text deal with Wikis and RRS feeds respectively. Chapter 4 begins on page 55 with a powerful quote from the creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, states "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." The collaboration and synthesis of the experts of various fields can come together and combine their knowledge for the entire world to benefit and share. It is almost awe inspiring in its aspiration. To be honest, if anyone has a question, and I don't know the answer, I quickly google it, and 4 out of 5 times I'll be forwarded to Wikipedia. The tough part about Wikipedia is that it IS a wiki, it can be edited by any author at any time. The collaboration that is included in that wealth of knowledge is wonderful, but dangerously powerful. Although, there are always more editors ensuring that the information being edited is correct then there are authors posting incorrect information, it is difficult to always be certain that the page you're currently browsing is completely accurate. For that reason, my schools have always called wikipedia a site that was 'off limits' as a resource for papers.
I am not positive where schools should stand on this issue now. I suppose that if we want to teach our students to be critical users and active participants in the world of Web 2.0, then wikis are deffinately a part of them. Similar to blogs, students can easily post, edit, review, and collaborate with peers or even experts from across the world. It is also extremely neat that as history is in the making, a new entry can be created to share the events with the world, just as its occurring. Similar to the events of the earth quake in 2004, listed on page 57. Wikipedia is so frequently edited by experts to ensure correctness of information, that it can almost always be a trusted resource. Maybe schools can use wikipedia as a stepping ground for research, to teach students to have a critical eye and find other sources that verify or disprove the information provided. There are other uses for wikis, not just wikipedia, in the classroom. Schools or classrooms can create their own wikis to create entries on, so that the work is more private and authentically each student's own, but still offers the venue for peer collaboration and editing.
RRS feeds were completely foreign to me. I could not have guessed what RRS even stood for, fortunately on page 71, Richardson explains that "RRS stands for Really Simple Syndication." An RSS is basically a place where one can have technology do the work for you in terms of keeping up on, tracking, locating, and saving information from all of the many sites/blogs/wikis/whatever else you may want to be following. In the ever expanding world on the internet, and the more time crunched lives of educators, it seems it would be impossible to check every site or blog for new information all the time, every day, or even just once a week. Utilizing this tool makes it possible for the work to be done for you. This tool can be used for professional development, or personal interests, as well as in the classroom setting. If a class is full of students with blogs, a teacher can use the RSS to follow all of them at once, instead of having to manually enter into each of the students weblogs. The possibility of using RSS feeds for student research is just a wonderful use of a tool for research to be ongoing 24/7, which could be used for primary students as a whole class activity, or individualized for older students interests and projects. Farkas' article Keeping Up, 2.0 Style, nicely articulates the bountiful usefulness of RSS feeds with the simple reminder of how busy and short our days can become. Using RSS feeds can help simplify ones use of all of the great internet resources and help keep people up to date.
Radical Change & Wikis: teaching new literacies, written by Luce-Kapler is an article that discusses how to utilize wikis in the classroom. The article promotes who well students took on the art form of the digital media and texts, and adapted those traits into their own publishing, making them better writers. The article gives many great ideas and uses for wikis in the educational setting, as did the other article, Digital Literacies, written by Knobel and Lanksher. The two authors shed light on how even more valuable wikis can be for collaboration on the web. It seems to be that wikis help to engage students and spark there interests. With motivation always serving as a difficult thing to tackle for some students the resourcefulness of these online tools can really help to pool a classroom together towards literacy on the read-write-web.
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