Collaborative software, software designed to help people involved in a common task, achieve their goals – Wikipedia accessed 2/12/2007. Quite a logical and simple definition of something that has become rather a revolution in today’s society. The attraction of the digital lifestyle has been made all the more popular by collaborative technologies especially in the digital native category. It would be a missed opportunity to dismiss such activities as irrelevant to teaching and learning, as I have said before, we as educators need to seize the potential of such tools to support and enhance our education system. We have begun to utilise these collaborative technologies in universities particularly by the use of VLEs to deliver and track content, to collect and share resources and generally bring it all together in an integrated environment.
So this week I am exploring the use of the collaborative wiki with my first year Educational Studies group. I hope to get them motivated in to using a wiki as a forum for their shared experiences.
I was impressed by an article I read in the Guardian last week about the development of Curriki. Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. The article impressed that the Internet has proved to the great world equalizer, providing opportunities to collaborate on the development and delivery of intellectual assets on a global scale. Sounds a wonderful idea, and it is an inspiring concept worth checking out to see if you have anything worth adding to it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o - if you have a few minutes, watch this video, let me know what you think.
