New Zealand police and Wikis

Has anybody heard (read) about the attempt by the New Zealand police to revise their laws and regulations through a Wiki?
I just read a piece in a Spanish newspaper and I was wondering if there is an English version to share with this group. If you are interested I can give you the Spanish-language reference.
What would happen if the faculty were to propose a revision to the administrative structure of the school using a Wiki? How about designing a protocol for the curriculum review through a Wiki?
Precisely.

first experience with wiki not so great

Curious to know how others have done with wikis (wikies?). I created one for my introductory American government class and asked the students to use it to write mock court rulings. The students had a little over a week to do the assignment. They formed 4 groups, each responsible for the equivalent of 2 pages of text.

Two significant problems:

1) About 6 of the 27 students in the class didn't participate.

2) The hoped-for collaborative strength didn't materialize. The writings were choppy, and in a couple of the cases no one took the time to stitch together the various pieces that group members created. Punch-line: the entries read like a bunch of disjointed notes, not like a final document.

You can see the results for yourself (as if you have nothing else to do w/ your time) at iwu-americangovernment.wikispaces.com

open to suggestions --

Greg

Blog vs. Wiki?

Anyone have any thoughts about which pedagogical purposes are best served by a blog and which are best served by a wiki?

Wes Chapman

News Items

From today's InsideHigherEd.com's newsletter:

• Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, arranged to with Facebook to eliminate a group on the site devoted to opposing the university’s alleged use of animals in research, Canada.com reported. The group, called “Stop Dogs and Puppies From Being Murdered at Dalhousie University,” attracted thousands of members. University officials said that they did not have the site removed for being critical, but because it would not post responses from the university or correct inaccurate information. For instance, university officials said that the site featured pictures of dogs that appeared scared — as if they were part of university experiments when they were not.
• Many college students have been slow to embrace e-books, so Café Scribe, which offers online textbooks, commissioned a poll on what they most like about books in traditional form — and 43 percent cited issues related to smell (either liking “old book” smell or “new book” smell. So the publisher announced that it would send scratch-and-sniff stickers to those students who buy e-books.

Wiki instead of textbook?

Hi all,

I've been watching your posts here with great interest. Sounds like you all are planning some interesting projects for the upcoming semester.

Let me join in by pointing you to a Computerworld article about a professor at Boston College (my alma mater.) This fellow has been using a wiki as the "primary teaching tool" in his classroom since October.

Do you think abandoning a text book in favor of a wiki is too radical an approach, or perhaps worth a try?

(BTW - I found this article from the rss feed of the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog.)

Use of a blog

Here is my attempt at using some of the information presented at our workshop this spring. Students in the Twenty First Century Techniques for Music Education class this fall will be asked to participate in a class blog. I will assign one student each week to discuss the technology (Finale, Band-in-a-Box, Publisher, PowerPoint, creating web pages, etc) or the jazz pedagogy we are covering that particular week, and then request class members respond to that blog entry. The class will also be introduced to WIKI and RSS by Rick Lindquist from IT. This year we will not have specific assignments using these options, but will consider using them in future classes.

Request for Bloggers!

Hi everyone,

As the end of summer rapidly approaches, the Summer Reading Project is gearing up. The library has a webpage with a number of resources about Mountains Beyond Mountains - articles, sites, video/audio interviews with Kidder and Dr. Paul Farmer, etc..

If you're reading the book or if you've read the book, or if you have any knowledge/opinion of the book or of Dr. Farmer's work, I would love it if you'd post to the IWU Reads blog at http://iwureads.blogspot.com/. Right now, it's just me, so it would be great to get other faculty voices in the mix! Students know about the blog thanks to mailings and a link from the "Class of 2011" Facebook group, so hopefully some of them will also chime in.

Please email me so I can invite you to participate in the blog through Blogger!

Thanks in advance!
Stephanie