In reading the passages for class I came across a few lines that screamed out at me, but for a project I'm working on outside of class. For this project I was to come up with ways of implementing the use of wikis in an English Language Arts classroom. Enter in the text from The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, page 309.
...becoming literate in a hypermedia environment challenges the notion that any single text represents an author's complete, separate, or unique expression...the perceived need to develop young people's critical awareness of how all authored texts (print, visual, oral) situate them as readers, writers, and viewers within a particular culture and historical contexts.
Eureka! The whole notion of a wiki is that it is a document that is authored, edited, and complied by a multitude of individuals. While a single person may create an article in a wiki, it is up to a social group at large to craft and shape the article in such a way that the group as a whole comes to a consensus of accepted and correct information.
What excited me further in my reading and crafting of this wiki project was stumbling across a web page from the Australian government's Department of Education and Training
on the uses of wikis in education. I was floored by the fact that a GOVERNMENTAL website deemed wikis as a valid educational tool. For me this is the coolest thing to come out of Australia since Fosters and Hue Jackman.
In my work I also stumbled across and interesting revelation, that being that Google Docs are an off chute of wikis. Sure, a document that starts out with a single author and then is collaboratively edited and re-crafted until the group as a whole comes to an consensus on the content of the document. Perhaps to those reading this seems like a "duh" moment for me, but the realization came from a wiki farm website called JotSpot. JotSpot was bought out by Google and aptly renamed...(drum roll please)...Google Docs.
So are things like wikis and Google Docs the direction that we're moving (or should be) toward
crafting knowledge? I believe so. Not only is knowledge itself a social construct, but when people are personally invested in an area of knowledge, that knowledge transfers from simply ideas to a tool which can be used to shape a variety of other thoughts and ideas to create further meaningful connections. So do us all a favor, whatever it is that you are really interested in, go on Wikipedia and make a contribution. Ok, so if you don't want to specifically be an author or contributor, you can still participate in wiki culture as a lurker but you better question that which you lurk upon to construct a deeper meaning and understanding of the information you so deftly hide in front of.
