With that in mind. you might want to drop wikispaces and get your own hosting, then just install your own Media Wiki and you’ve got control over everything. Once that’s done, you can set up individual accounts and have a good handle on things from there.

A great educator here in Scotland, RF Mackenzie (who died many years ago), once wrote:

“The great mistake we educationists make is to suppose that schools are about education. It is not so, they are about control.”

I think your example displays the difficulty that teachers, and schools, have in giving up even some of the control they feel that they need to be able to direct learning. Teachers today have the chance to cede some control at least to the learners themselves, but it’s not yet in teachers’ DNA, basically.

Great blog, by the way.

I will do a better job of modeling next time I introduce wikis. I also need to really teach what collaboration means- it’s not quite the sabotage I saw on some pages- deleting the other group’s work because you didn’t like it. I learned a lot, the kids learned about the topic and a little about the tool and a lot about how to work together.

I suppose if someone had come in to evaluate me at the time, they would have been less than impressed. I have explained to the kids that these are new ways for me to do things as well as new for them. I think that letting them see me go through the plan, evaluate, and redo cycle with them is a valuable lesson. I don’t always know what will happen. I am certainly not an expert on web 2.0 tools, but am willing to try- which is really the lesson I want them to learn- even teachers have to learn new things and they have to learn in much the same ways that the kids learn.

Gotta say though, I had some upset parents since I graded on collaborative work skills and their kids are very competitive, not great collaborators.

“Dear All,

Just a note to remind you on the use of this messaging function.

This must not be used for discussions that do not relate to Maths or the blog.

All messages are automatically sent to my email, so you must assume that nothing you send on here is considered private.

Please do not use the “Add all members of…” function as, due to the above reason, it sends me over 30 emails!

Any abuse of this messaging function is likely to result in you losing all you ICT access at school, and all of us losing the use of this blog.

Don’t let me down.

Mr Stucke :)”

I am confident that there will be no problems.

They are innocent enough at present, a “hello” here and “what are we meant to be doing” there. And rather pleasingly a “maths has become cool” replied by “yeah!!!!! this is better than doing work” which made my day when I read it this morning!

My administrators are a little nervous about the wiki and I’d forgotten about this function when I set it up. I hope there will be no issue, I discussed this with the class as soon as I noticed they had found the function and they understand that any abuse of the system is likely to result in the whole project being canned.

Dan

Perhaps using the blogs/wikis etc. for social reasons, too, is OK as long as the teacher has some moderation/oversight availability. Perhaps using the Google subaccount (+) method for setting up email accounts, similar to some teachers’ use for blogs. Then the teacher can monitor any email activity before students see it.

Some class blogs programs also do not require email accounts at all.

Frank

Your friend is right: you can’t ever underestimate the importance of modeling and setup (as well as consequences for misuse). I just hope this misstep on the part of the student teacher doesn’t discourage other teachers from trying wikis once they get wind of what happened.