Good for you for being interested in some of these exciting new technologies. Rather than see these as solutions in themselves, though, keep them in mind as just a few more components to add to your educational toolkit. We’ll examine each of them individually.
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A blog (short for Weblog) is a Website containing links and commentary with regular postings in reverse chronological order (newest at the top, oldest at the bottom). Often used by teenagers for online journaling, blogs are beginning to gain respect in the business world as knowledge management tools.
The T+D blog has covered the blogs-as-KM-tools phenomenon several times, most recently pointing out an excellent article by
The Learning Circuits article “Learn to Blog, Blog to Learn” offers more information on ways blogs can be used in education. The e-Learning Centre offers a great list of resources on blogging and the next technology we’ll discuss, RSS.
RSS works in combination with Weblogs and Websites. Depending on who you ask, the acronym stands for Rich Site Summary, RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. What does the technology do? It provides a means of driving content from a Website to a reader automatically, without threat of interference from viruses, spam, or spyware.
In the LC article, "RSS: Grassroots Support Leads to Mass Appeal," Stephen Downes, senior research officer for the Institute for Information Technology for the National Research Council in Canada, outlines the evolution of RSS. Likewise, the Learning Circuits article “RSS: A Learning Technology” discusses some current and potential uses for RSS in education. One way RSS is already being used is to increase the power of blogs: Using an RSS reader that collects “feeds” from various blogs is an easy way to keep track of and up-to-date on their newest content.
An up-and-coming use for RSS is to distribute learning objects from learning object repositories. In the not-too-distant future, the combination of these repositories and RSS technology may replace LMSs—a centralized model moving to a networked one. See the Learning Circuits RSS article for more on this.
A wiki is a Website that is collaboratively created and maintained. In “We Learning, part II,” the tool is described as a “composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, a mail system, a chat room, and a tool for collaboration.”
With a wiki, the administration of a Webpage is taken out of the hands of an individual and given to a group. That can be a group of learners, a department in a company, or everyone on the World Wide Web, depending on how the wiki is set up. That can make it a tool for collaborative learning.
Technologies Internet et Education, a research and teaching group at the University of Geneva, suggests multiple uses for wikis in education, including assignment hand-in (with peer ratings added), collaborative Web writing, case libraries, practice sites for collaboration skills, and more.
Amy Gahran discusses the pros and cons of using wikis in e-learning in her Weblog post “Learning With (and From) Wikis.”
A bliki is the most recently developed tool on this list. A combination of a blog and a wiki, the first one may have been developed by software consultant Martin Fowler. Here’s his explanation of it.
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia created via the wiki model, defines a bliki as “a blog with wiki support. Which means that after (or before) an article is posted to the blog, it can be edited, either by anyone or by some group of authorized users.” That can have advantages or disadvantages, the entry goes on to say. It can increase interaction, but can also open the door to abuse.
Blikis are so new that they’re still in the experimental phase. Keep an eye out to see how they’re used by early adopters, or forge the way yourself for their use in education—and let us know how it turns out.