Webinar: More 21st C. "Learning 2.0" with Classroom Wikis

by Clay Burell

Published January 27, 2009 @ 12:48PM PT

Several parents, students, and teachers have contacted me privately asking for more along the lines of the "Why Schoolwork Doesn't Have to Suck: Learning 2.0" post on pedagogy that incorporates such social media/web 2.0 tools as blogs, wikis, and podcasts. I'm happy to oblige, because I love this stuff.

Wikispaces is an online wiki provider, free to teachers with no ads, that is hugely popular among teachers worldwide who have turned onto "learning 2.0."  The folks at Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar (embedded below) about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes:

1. The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, embedded videos, and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog);
2. the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interacted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries;
3. King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and
4. the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.

The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss my thoughts on the relative merits of local v. global approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)

Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and present the highlights in one fell swoop.

If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives on my other blog.

Here’s the webinar. It starts about half-way through the one-hour event, when my presentation began. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners, if anybody needs an intro to driving these surprisingly easy beasts. Done well - and that's a big caveat - wikis can transform classroom learning. I've seen it happen over and over.  (The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):

.