Wiki collaboration on air

Spark, part of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, recently released an interview with Howard Rheingold, author of “Smart Mobs” and professor at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. Rheingold uses wikis, including solutions from Socialtext, for fostering better collaboration with and between his students. Wikis make it easy to create and publish web pages that become a linked set of shared resources to complement the classroom environment. For the professor, in Rheingold’s case, the wiki makes it easy to modify the class syllabus and let the curriculum content and structure evolve over time as new ideas or topics of interest come up. For students, the wikis are used to publish learning journals and blog posts to share knowledge, make their own contributions to the course curriculum, and even collaborate together on team projects. As Rheingold puts it, the wiki shifts the traditional role of the professor in the classroom from the “sage on the stage, moving to the guide on the side.” Accordingly, students have a greater ability to contribute and actively participate in the classroom experience like never before, so the whole learning process becomes more fluid and dynamic. Listen to the interview to learn more.

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