Wednesday, June 18, 2008

reflecting on first flirt with wikiing in L&T

On the negatives:
  1. Students were thrown by the request to edit a page within Blackboard - cant get away from the fact that this may be partly my own baggage with this perception but that is literally what I witnessed from some who came in to attempt it. I would not lay all the blame on Blackboard as a monolithic VLE, nor the fact that the course is set up around didactic transmission of knowledge. It is the simple fact that it took a while to sink in that they could edit in there.
  2. I think the layout that I have run with on several occasions now (only with a discussion list in the past) was too rigidly following the mindmap I did of module themes. To make this easier I need to streamline and probably leave out some pages. Even in the discussion list version this would be a good idea. In fact, I have had a sense that some of the themes cross-over anyway so there is duplication which can only lead to confusion. I could organise it with the front page having a limited list of topics and then students edit the front page to add a linktoanewpage naming it with the website's name which would then come up in the list of pages on the right. (Ok - done that now after an hour or so!)
I've set up an evaluation page anyway and emailed students asking for feedback so lets see what comes of that...

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