Appropriately enough, Wikipedia has a page that includes a comparison chart for various wiki "farms"–from those that are paid services to those that are free (usually ad-supported). This is probably the easiest option for a first crack at using a wiki for a course insofar as it requires no institutional support at all. Check out this page for more information.
Some interesting reading and resources
I just thought I'd share a couple of useful tidbits with you all here via the blog. First, I'd like to highly recommend this piece–Technology as Epistemology–by Peter Schilling, the IT director at Amherst. It's a provocative essay, and you may find that you disagree, but it's useful as an entry point into this huge and important conversation about just how technology affects not only learning, but the processes of thought and knowledge creation themselves. I'd love to hear what you all think (feel free to post separately or as comments if you want to conduct this conversation here). (more…)
How to use tools without endorsing brands?
One issue that I don't think we probably talk about enough when it comes to using technology for educational purposes is what the effect is of asking students to use particular software packages, especially commercial software packages? When we choose textbooks, I suppose that we don't worry about the "brand" behind them so much as we worry about the content of the books themselves. I hope this is the case when we decide on what software to use.
I'm not, however, sure that this is the case insofar as many of our decisions are made for us by the institutions in which we are working. For example, the fact that we are conducting our workshops in the Arc lab means that we do not effectively have the option of using, for example, Firefox as our web browser or OpenOffice as our office suite.
Is there an ethics to asking (or not asking) students to use PowerPoint? Are we willing to avoid commercial software altogether and rely on less ubiquitous and (sometimes) less-supported open-source software? (more…)
