"Digital Media Grad Class Week 2--Blogs & Wikis"

This week we spent time looking over Blogs and Wikis. I am actually expanding my thoughts on these two areas. My initial thoughts were that these were a difficult and practically non-useful thing for students to engage in, but being relatively open-minded, I am beginning to see the creative way that these can impact my students in my class. I find that wikis are a great way to allow students to explore open software, engage in community collaboration, generate respect for other people's ideas (especially ideas different from your own), and how to really examine the intellectual property debate as well as to understand the idea of public domain. Blogs can be useful as a way for students to record their ideas and to compare/contrast them with others as well as begin to delve into the area of critical thinking that is beneficial to them as adults and humans.

The challenge for me is to present the usefulness of these tools to my administrator and the school board as a valid way for students to learn and grow. My school's policy prohibits the use of these two tools and prohibits students from publishing anything online. So I need to build a bridge between this mindset and the one that encourages the growth of student ability and knowledge through Read/Write web collaboration.