Instructional Technology Conference 2009

Title: Wikis to Communicate

Name: Sara Rofofsky Marcus

Audience: Faculty, librarians, and instructional technology specialists.

Audience Level: All

Length: 1 Hour

Abstract: This session leads participants through exploring the use of a wiki in a course, and assists participants in creating a wiki to suit their own pedagogical style for a course of their selection.  Exploring tips, techniques, tribulations, and successes, participants will determine the best way to integrate wikis into their courses, while remaining true to their teaching style.  Each member will leave with the rudiments of a wiki created for a course of their choosing.

Description: This session explores the use of a Wiki to create a visual, collaborative, online album. Wikis are highly collaborative by nature.  This helps ensure quality and order. By collaborating to create an online visual resource, participants can provide their own skills to the portions best suited to their knowledge base along with reviewing contributions of others. Through the relatively effortless collaboration available via wikis, the community creating this valuable resource can share individual knowledge and skills. Group members will be required to brainstorm, gather subject expertise, and work together to present the group's vast wisdom as a single entity. Defying barriers such as time and place, geographically or even just time-diverse participants can be invited to share their unique and dispersed knowledge. The low learning curve of wikis helps eliminates the technical barriers as does the self-contained publishing software nature of the wiki. The wiki enables a distributed set of users to edit and overwrite existing content, create new content, revert back to previous versions, comment, attach files, and compare versions.  These wikis can be public or accessible to all, or can be private for select use only. Giving members of the course editorial control can imbue in them a sense of responsibility and ownership, developing and using all sorts of collaborative skills to negotiate with others on a final version.

Students can import images for others to caption, or can work together to organize their collective images and knowledge to create a visual and textual resource that is hyperlinked as the users create throughout the term.  Participants will leave the session with a working knowledge of the creation of a wiki using PBWiki, and ideas for integrating the use of a wiki into their own course.

Session Type: Hands-on Workshop

On-Site Equipment Requirements: Internet access for all, LCD projector

Contact Information/Affiliation:
Sara Rofofsky Marcus
Queensborough Community College (CUNY)
Kurt R. Schmeller Library
222-05 56 Ave
Bayside, New York 11364
(718)281-5795
smmarcus@qcc.cuny.edu