About+wiki's

Wiki's are an interesting piece of technology that can benefit collaboration within the educational environment. I really like the idea of collaboration. As an educator, I've always felt that students learn more when they are allowed to interact with each other. In the old days we called this cooperative learning. I like how students can partake in several different ways. OF course this comes down to the instructors ability to to set things up by creating pages and links and then doing it in a way that they can monitor progress and produce results. Wiki tends to be more interactive friendly. I can definitely see where a teacher could set up a correspondence course using wiki.I have a friend you teaches in remote Alaska. He flies in with families and lives with them for two weeks before moving on to the next. This technology would be an excellent way to collaborate with all of his students and monitor progress. Of course everyone would have to have computer access to the internet. That could be challenging in the wilderness.

I can't help thinking about the movie "Surrogates", where everyone stays at home in their machine that links them to a surrogate robot. They feel and experience everything without have to fear about getting physically hurt. It's as if they could become someone else. It's kind of like Wiki. You can set it up to do everything in a convenient location and never have to venture to school. Kind of like how texting has replaced use of the telephone.