wikis

Week 4 started slowly on Ash Wednesday, allowing for Carnival time and jet lag recovery for some :-). We engaged in intensive work in the past three weeks, opening accounts, getting acquainted with / connecting to other participants through these different tools/environments, reflecting and sharing with each other our doubts, questions and expertise. Congratulations on the hard work and the great posts and reflections on the blogs.

We are not in a hurry. We all need some time to digest all this food for thought. On the other hand, we must transform all the energy generated into concentrated action. This is why we have suggested getting together in groups according to your tool preferences, so as to discuss, explore them in more depth and hopefully envisage a repository of good practice and some learning sequences incorporating one or several of them for use in the language classroom. There is a lot of talent and experience gathered here, so we expect some very fruiful exchanges and knowledge sharing. We will be using the different fora for preliminary reflection and discussions and the SMiELT "hysterically hierarchical" Wiki for tips, links and collaborative content building.

If you feel like making an informal synchronous presentation of your own experience with a certain tool or practice demonstration, we could envisage meetings on Wiziq, Ustream or a tool of your preference in the next two weeks. Let us know if you are interested in the comment area of this post, giving us date/time GMT/topic and the conference platform you would like to use so we can organize it together.

In yesterday’s presentation ," Building Open Content on Wikis", Wayne Macintosh recapitulated some of the main points of the Commonwealth of Learning vision for using Wikieducator to produce open learning content. He also gave examples of a number of related projects and partnerships which strive to build open /reusable content to make it available to those who do not have access to it. He invited participants to join one of the monthly wiki training courses offered by COL and said they are not restricted to Commonwealth members only. In order to participate, attendees commit to developing lessons on a topic of their choice, using the WikiEducator development platform. Here are some of the FAQ and the tutorials for autonomous learning. He demonstrated interest in a project for ESL teachers and although the working language is English, he mentioned nothing prevents participants from creating resources in their own native languages.

So, let’s join the different fora and start brainstorming and sharing how we can use these tools in dynamic, open and participatory ways. Looking forward to it!