A Brief Book Review

A Brief Review of Chapter 4: Wikis: Easy Collaboration fro All by: Mary Jane de LeonIntroductionThe book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web tools for classrooms, as a whole is a concise and easy to read reference for some of the digital technologies out there that can be used in the classroom teaching as a means to effectively communicate and involved the students in their learning. The "faculty-centered" learning style or even the "student-centered" learning style is all but history now. The web opens all the endless possibilities and one can only imagine what is going to be like in the future with these fast advancing technology. As it was said in chapter 9 of the book, "What it All Means", we created a "share drive" that anybody can log-in, use it, and collaboratively improving it to the limitless possibility.Chapter 4 Wikis: Easy Collaboration for AllThis particular chapter of the book is very interesting to me. I have use the Wikipedia as one of my references when searching in the web but I never knew that it was a collaborative effort of not one author but maybe thousands or even millions of authors. Richardson (2006) quoted the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, who said that the goal of Wikipedia is to "give to every single person in the planet the free access to the sum of all human knowledge" (Wales, 2004 as cited by Richardson, 2006). This is a powerful statement that can drive anyone to the spectrum of awe and admiration to pessimism and skepticism. How can you possibly gather the sum of all human knowledge in one place and will be available right at your fingertips? That is impossible until the web came along.This chapter talks about how the wiki works, which is basically edit and save function. One important feature is the page history that gives you the information of when the changes was made, whom, and what was the changes. One pertinent issue that was raised by the author was the copyright or the intellectual propriety since there are multiple authors in one entry. My opinion is the same as the others, producing a quality collectively gathered product is more important that owning it. The author enumerated some challenges in schools when using wiki in the classroom teaching. They are the following: 1) "it might be wrong"; 2) what sources to trust; 3) wiki should not be the sole resource; 4) do you have to repeat the work that is already done?; 5) how can you encourage students to contribute? These are all true and needed to address when using wiki in the classroom as a teaching and learning strategy. Reference:Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press,