Week One - Group Task

Defining our terms: websites, blogs or wikis?

A website is a collection of webpages belonging to a particular domain or sub-domain on the Internet. Websites may be the work of an individual, an organization or business. They are usually dedicated to some particular topic or purpose.

Visitors can browse through them and consume what they contain (notice some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content). The visitor expects the website to be fairly static until the next `redesign'. Communication tends to go mostly one-way, with the webmaster “presenting” something to "the world". Common features include the use of (hyper)text, sound, and various types of visuals, as well as the presence of sidebars to make one's way around easier...

A blog is short for 'Web log' and it's a user-generated website, where entries are made journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order. This means that,when you visit it, the first thing you see is the last post its creator made. Several posts may be viewed by scrolling down the long page, and much older posts are archived but still accessible

A blog may be used as a personal online diary (at the beginning, most of them were "too confessional"!), or a place where one or several people (team blogging) can publish news or comments on a particular subject (for example, Stephen Downes' OLDDaily has been reported as the first educational blog ever). Blogs are more interactive than websites, since they usually allow readers to post comments. In ohter words, n a blog you can have conversations with people who are interested in what you have to say!!! It is worth pointing out that changes to posts (entries) can only be made by the poster and the blog's administrator, whereas readers are restricted to the area for comments (and these can be moderated or even deleted or rejected). In that sense, a blog can be said to resemble a message board too.

A wiki is an interactive, potentially collaborative, website. Content can be edited, modified or added by any user (to become a user, a wiki-wide password is usually, though not always, required). In a wiki, you cannot have a conversation, but you can change what was said! That is why it can be said that what is published on a wiki is never finished, and users might expect a wiki's content to change frequently. A wiki is ideal for collaborative writing (several writers working on one product), and, though it sounds like a recipe for disaster and most first-timers find wikis a bit unsettling, good teams have produced outstanding results so far (just look at this page for an example!). Wikis sometimes include a search engine (as in Wikipedia).

We might draw a parallelism between each of these environments and patterns of interaction in classes or groups:

Conclusion:

On the whole, websites are products of Web 1.0, or the readable web, in which mainly tech-savvy authors and webmasters publish information and manipulate design features. Although websites are very useful for conveying information and announcements, they may have limited applications for educational purposes, especially if educators wish to foster communication and interpersonal interaction among learners.

Blogs and wikis are, instead, the offspring of web 2.0, or the readable/write-able web, which allows users to create, publish, edit and share content individually or collaboratively on the web, by adapting design features to meet their own needs as well as those of their audiences.

Adaptation is an essential factor for educators who wish to personalize and tailor spaces for class interactions. Especially for teaching, creators of blogs and wikis may expect to build communities of participants, and their sites then become more interactive (unlike traditional, non-blog, non-wiki websites). Moreover, educators may think of site maintenance less in terms of redesign phases, and more in terms of frequents updates and elaborations.

References

Barger, John. (1997). [Perhaps a reference to:] Robot wisdom weblog. Retrieved January 23, 2007, from http://www.robotwisdom.com/

Blood, Rebecca. (2000). [Perhaps a reference to:] Weblogs: A history and perspective. In: Rebecca's Pocket, 07 September. Retrieved January 23, 2007, from

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html [Found through cross-reference in: Kylie Jarrett (2004), Battlecat then, Battlecat now: Temporal shifts, hyperlinking and database subjectivities. Retrieved January 23, 2007 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/battlecat_then_battlecat_now.html]

Tomei, J., & Lavin, R. (2006). Autonomy Arising from Community: Experiences with Weblogs and Wikis [Keynote (trademark) presentation]. Kumamoto University: January 14, 2006.

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