Reading Response- Chapter 5
For this week’s reading of Lankshear & Knobel, I found myself looking at my experience as a TechTA last semester. Being a TechTA for the CU Denver School of Education and Human Development, I am often assigned a professor to work with throughout the semester to improve their online courses. With last semester being my first time in the TechTA program I was fortunate enough to put into practice what I have been learning throughout my graduate work. Professors often tell me, they just want their course to look good and provide a good online experience. With my interest in providing an interactive online experience for students, wikis came to mind when trying to think of ideas. Last semester, I was able to convince a professor to implement a wiki into their canvas course. Similar to our reading our goal was to create a collaborative resource where the students would be in charge, we wanted the students to tell us what they felt was important rather than just answering weekly questions. We came into the project with the notion of let’s just give them a blank page and give them the controls. However, reflecting on my experience now I wish we would have given them more structure. Though wikis are powerful because they provide a collaborative platform, I also believe people needed structure to get them started. From our readings and my experience, I also wish I would have thought of blogging. The implemented wiki were awesome, but they felt a bit disconnected. Being my first time implementing a wiki, I felt that the students were just finding information and putting them together without really working together. One point I found interesting from the reading were how blogs promote interaction through commenting. With how wikis and blogs are set up now they provide an easy access tool towards online interaction. Personally, I find it interesting in how blogs and wikis were discredited before in education, but now there is a shift to use these tools in the classroom.
