This content was created by Ramit Sethi. This content was uploaded by Ramit Sethi. This is a YouTube video titled 'pb wiki-how do you use pbwiki?' created on March 3, 2007, featuring multiple speakers discussing the use of wikis in educational settings, including organizing documents, enhancing learning through digital media, and fostering critical thinking skills in students.
In a course where you may have certain chapters or modules to ask the kids to go out and find definitions to vocabulary terms, bring those back in the wiki to find other articles that may relate to that kind of depth of learning.
We want to just kind of centralize all our documents, our meeting times, our project ideas and contact information. What I finally had to do is have to have the wiki to manage the wikis. I know that sounds crazy, but I have the central wiki finally that manages all the other wikis.
We have a textbook that we kind of go along with it. It's kind of very, I don't know, it has its limitations. It's a textbook and it doesn't always make all the connections to all the digital media that's out there. So what I do is I have my students, I sign them portions of chapters that kind of introduce different concepts and then they use the web to kind of support their ideas. So I'm seeing connections that they're making to the concepts that go beyond our discussions and kind of personalize with their own interests. And it just takes the conversation in class to a whole other level.
I started off with posting an agenda for our upcoming meeting and asked everyone to go and look at the agenda ahead of time, add things and take things away. And it just started growing from there, where we would be posting documents we wanted to look at and sharing ideas to consider, asking questions of each other, responding to each other's ideas on the wiki. And so when it came time to meet, everyone had a really clear idea about what we were meeting about and had already put some forethought into the things we were going to discuss.
Right now they're doing a web design evaluation. The semester just started. So they're learning new tags for HTML. It's an elective course. And basically they're learning how to look at websites critically and go to a website and know this is a well designed site. This is a site that has purpose for me. If I'm doing research, is it a research site for adults? Is it a research site for kids? So it's trying to get them to use some critical thinking skills. Ultimately that goes into my assessment at the end of the semester when they do final projects because they're looking at this website saying this is a good website, Is my website a good website? And the wiki helped them get there.
