MMM PBW

edugadget dug this little gem out - PBWiki - a free wiki for anyone to use. Hopefully it stays free (perhaps it may be swallowed by Google- but so far that is not a bad thing) and more educators can start to use it. I can see uses for wikis anywhere collaboration is desired. It seems many people think that is only in one class or another. But I would argue that in in ELA classes, students can work together on a script. In Social students can collaborate on a position, in science on an experiment and in math they can create explanations for a concept. The trick is to understand that the world is moving away from single minds being the most vital vessel of knowledge and toward a realm where the "hive mind" is the ruler and collaboration is more important. Some may say, that is all fine and dandy, but how would one mark these then? That is fairly simple - the same way group projects are already marked, there is nothing different about them other than they are online and are (for some students at least) far more accessible. Unfortunately, reading this, you are already the converted, getting the rest to understand is going to take some time. But unless we introduce these sorts of tools in pre-service classes, we'll have a continually mounting hill to climb with this regard as students will emerge with teaching ideas that are at least twenty years old in a world that is so "flat" that anything that has a time stamped is old by the time the second person knows about it (ok, maybe not that fast, but certainly a few months is all that it takes for news to be ancient online). Technorati Tags: Wiki, Technology Integration