Week 7: "Thing 16"

Before this Discovery Exercise I knew very little about wiki's.
My first attempt to view a wiki resulted in the below image.

I was a little confused as to how peanut butter and jelly sandwiches connected to the wiki world but I came to the conclusion that the above image was just a global wiki update alert. A quick google search helped me to understand that "PeanutButterWiki or PBwiki is a commercial wiki farm started by three graduates of Stanford University: David Weekly, Ramit Sethi, and Nathan Schmidt." However it is still a mystery to me as to why the three graduate students chose to create a wiki farm named after a popular type of sandwich enjoyed by small children (maybe it was the only thing they had to eat as once poor college students).

After visiting the BookLoversWiki I found out that "The term Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki which means quick. A wiki is a kind of website that is written collaboratively and that multiple people can edit easily and quickly."

The website entitled Library Successdefined a wiki as a collaborative catalyst and stated...
"A wiki allows a group of people to collaboratively develop a Web site with no knowledge of HTML or other markup languages. Anyone can add to or edit pages in a wiki -- it is completely egalitarian. Anyone can create new wiki pages simply by creating a new link with the name of the page. Pages are connected not hierarchically, but by hyperlinks between pages.

According to the creator of Wiki, Ward Cunningham, wikis can be identified by the following characteristics:

* "A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons."
* "Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and by showing whether an intended target page exists or not."
* "A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape."

I found the above definition helpful because with all of the Web 2.0 tools I have been exploring as a requirement of this class, it is my goal to identify the specific purpose of each tool and then learn how to use it in collaboartion with the other Web 2.0 tools I have already learned about.

I am currently addicted to Blogger and maintain a class blog for my first grade students and parents in an attempt to motivate students to do their best work, as well as keep parents well-informed. As I explored the usefulness of wiki's, I could quite easily brainstorm curriculum connections for using a wiki with my students and linking it to my class blog.

For example:
* Idea #1: A collaborative project on George Washington and Abraham Lincoln - In honor of President's Day our class has been studying the lives of Washington and Lincoln. Every student could add something that they learned about each former President to our class wiki.
* Idea #2: Create a "Top 10" List - Our class could brainstorm and come up with a list of our favorite "Top 10" books to read aloud and post it to our wiki. We could update the list as it changed throughout the school year.
* Idea #3: Mission Trading Cards - Each student in my class could create a trading card from Big Huge Labs at the beginning of the school year, upload it to the class wiki, and then share it with their peers in order to get to know one another better and build community and foster friendships within the classroom.