Using Wiki in Education, the book, is now available as a downloadable PDF and Paperback at Lulu.com!

The PDF is available for $19, the same price as online access at Wikiineducation.com, and now there’s an all new option:

Paperback
Take it with you, keep it on your desk next to Wikipatterns, or give it to a friend. Whether you’re using a wiki in your teaching, research, committee work, curriculum planning, or writing a grant proposal, Using Wiki in Education offers advice and examples for making the most of your wiki use. The paperback is available for $24.95.

If you’ve already purchased access to Using Wiki in Education, simply log in to Wikiineducation.com to download a free PDF copy of the full book.

This video is excellent. Betsy, a student of my friend Vicki Davis in Georgia, asked students and teachers to describe wikis, blogs, and Web 2.0. Guess who know what the tools were, and gave the best explanations of their uses?

(via Milt Haynes)

Andrea Foster writes on the Wired Campus Blog that University of Texas at Dallas professor David Parry encourages his students to use Wikipedia:

“Like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge,” Mr. Parry writes “and training people for the future is about training them for this shift.”

Parry’s comments come from an article he published in Science Progress, in which he argues that banning Wikipedia isn’t just silly, it’s actually irresponsible.

It is irresponsible for educational institutions not to teach new knowledge technologies…Wikipedia, or more generally the networked archival structure it represents, alters the way in which we create, share, and record knowledge, and thus has rather significant effects on how we approach education across all disciplines, and specifically in technology and science.

Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities, and the new software changes the rules of expertise. [Read more]

That’s what Stephen Baker asks after a colleague brings up the subject:

A colleague who came into my office (to give me yet another math book) talked about how he used to cheat in high school math. He described networks of collaborators playing a daring game. It sounded much like the current ideals of education: People forming spontaneous teams and turning work into games.

Cheating is all too often used as a blanket term to discredit activity that teachers don’t understand. What some teachers label as cheating is really an attempt by students to make their work more exciting, social, and engaging.

People naturally self-organize in groups, divide work amongst themselves, and collaboratively assemble and refine the results of that work. That is more authentic than being assigned to groups, or working in artificial isolation.

Really, where’s the benefit in giving 30 students the identical assignment and telling them each to complete it individually? They will find ways to make that approach less mundane and unnatural, and the experience they get from working together is much more applicable to the way they’ll work in the real world.

Steve Hargadon emailed to let me know that planning is wrapping up for Classroom 2.0 LIVE, a 2-day workshop being held in San Francisco February 1 & 2. I’ll be presenting How to Be a Wiki Evangelist Within Your Organization on Friday (Feb. 1) afternoon. Steve is passionately committed to a vision of “engaged education” that is emerging [Read more]