Exploring+Wikis-+21st+Century+Texts

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New to wikis? Watch [|this short video from Common Craft]. Activity:

Part one: Tour some wikis

Take a tour of two wikis, one from high school and one from a university. The purpose here is to understand these wikis as an emerging text type, co-constructed by teachers and students. In order to see the entire text, you’ll want to explore the “History” and “Discussion” tabs attached to the pages.

Sample wikis:

An award-winning High School Wiki from Maine

[|An award-winning wiki from the University of New South Wales in Australia] Part two: Understanding Wikipedia

In November of 2012, Wikipedia, the 10-year-old online encyclopedia, was the 6th most popular website world-wide according to [|Alexa.com] . In my own classroom, I’ve often structured activities so that students have to use searches other than Google and find information on sites other than Wikipedia, because these tools have become part of a default reference process for students online. Although I try to coax, cajole and order students off of Wikipedia from time to time, I think the site, as the world’s most popular non-commercial website, has a lot to teach us about collaborative technologies and the blending of authorship and audience, product and process. The links below are just a few articles about the Wikipedia project itself. As you click through the links below, skim the articles themselves as well as the “Discussion” and “History” tabs to see the process and thinking work behind this collaborative writing.

[|What Wikipedia is not]

[|Wikipedia school and university projects]

[|America’s Top 100 Newspapers Use Wikipedia]

[|Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia]

Some additional reading

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[|Wikipedia improves students' work]

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">[|Wiki article from Edutopia.org]

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">[|A blog with examples of wikis]