Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange » Wiki http://ttix.org Web site for TTIX, the Open Conference Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:30:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Wikis For Educators (and Educators For Wikis) http://ttix.org/archives/2009-sessions/wikis-for-educators-and-educators-for-wikis/ http://ttix.org/archives/2009-sessions/wikis-for-educators-and-educators-for-wikis/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:37:28 +0000 Jared Stein http://ttix.org/?page_id=783 This 2-part session introduces participants to the popular Web 2.0 collaborative tool, the wiki. After we’ve discussed how wikis may be useful to educators, we’ll have a full hour of hands-on activity setting up your own free wiki, and learning to edit, cultivate, and maintain it.

]]> http://ttix.org/archives/2009-sessions/wikis-for-educators-and-educators-for-wikis/feed/ 0 Engagement of students in creation and maintenance of dynamic course materials http://ttix.org/archives/2009-sessions/engagement-of-students-in-creation-and-maintenance-of-dynamic-course-materials/ http://ttix.org/archives/2009-sessions/engagement-of-students-in-creation-and-maintenance-of-dynamic-course-materials/#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:48:51 +0000 W. Kirk Love http://ttix.org/2009-proposals/ Course materials can be very hard to maintain in a dynamic field such as computer science where technologies make major changes in time periods as small as a few months. This session teaches attendees how they can employ Wiki technology and engage students to not only keep documents up to date but to also adapt them to learning styles and changing demographics.

First Session

Engagement of students in creation and maintenance of dynamic course materials

Purpose of presentation (why is this important and who is the target audience)

We have growing requirements for independent study and distance education as we reach out to less traditional students and as we work with dropping budgets and increasing enrollments. These trends as mentioned above require more formal preparation of lesson materials so that students can work independently with little instructor involvement. When a subject of study is highly dynamic as we have in Computer Science and Information Technologies, it becomes very difficult for a faculty member to keep up documentation and course materials so they slowly spiral into irrelevance as does the class and its attractiveness to students.

Over the last two semesters I have employed a Web Wiki know as http://WikiLearn.uvu.edu/cs and I have engaged our students in the process of dynamically updating course material as our course progresses. The students and I have had a very positive experience and course materials are rapidly advancing. I also have successfully brought in adjunct faculty and other faculty members into this process.

Objectives of the presentation (what are you planning to do)

1. Build an understanding of how dynamic subject matter can impact course material and an instructor’s credibility.
2. Review new budget reality and show how adopting a wiki based course document library can help us do more with less, perhaps a lot more.
3. Technical review of Media Wiki as used in WikiLearn.uvu.edu and WikiPedia.org including document structure, management, access control, available tools, and basic edit procedures.
4. Review student response to their involvement and how their involvement actually impacted the documents.

Practical applications (how can your results/strategies be used by others)

Media Wiki can be used at several levels including by beginners. Through my experience I have defined a set of rules and rewards that have provided students with incentive to maintain course document and to do a quality job. With every class I’ve held using the Wiki beneficial changes have been made and my documents continue to become better and better.

Enough information will be given in this presentation that any attending faculty member should be able to set up such a Wiki and start using it in their courses of instruction upon their return home. They will know:
1. Were to get MediaWiki.
2. How to Install it and set its options.
3. Strategies for grouping and organizing documents.
4. Rules that need to be articulated and enforced (with expulsion if necessary).
5. Strategies for rewarding and motivating students to participate and do a good job.
6. And the will be given working templates that can help them quickly set up their Wiki.

Relationship to the conference theme

This is teaching with technology at its best: this technology engages students working to improve a course, keep it up to date, and to take responsibility for what they learn. It also lets faculty maintain much more sophisticated documents such that a student can use them with less faculty involvement. Students can adapt documents to multiple learning styles, and examples that may make more sense to a given group of individuals can be quickly added.

Information (data or theoretical base) to support what is advocated.

I will be able to show initial lesson materials and results of two semesters of evolution. I will also have stats on the number and types of changes that where made along with subjective evaluations made by students at the end of each semester.

Second Session

Building Your Wiki

Will setup and modify a wiki.

Presenter

W. Kirk Love

Graduated with an Associates in Mathematics from Ricks College Idaho, a BS in Data Processing and Numerical Techniques from Weber State, Utah, received a Masters in Computer Science from BYU.

I worked for over 25 years in software development before moving to UVU, beginning as a tenure track faculty member, October of 2000.

Since then, with student involvement, I have brought distance ed to our department, designed and deployed a digital class room using low cost web technologies, brought Image Processing to our department, and am now working on this Wiki Project.

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