On Collaboratively-Creating Communities

I really like the idea of creating a locally-hosted community-based website for a specific purpose, such as for school community development, or for a club or something. I have no idea why they are called ‘Nings’. I can see that a lot of what has been part of this course (Twitter, blogging, prezi, etc.) could be made more useful and easier to access with such a site. Site members could have their twitter stream automatically updated on their page, and teachers could have their twitter stream automatically updated on everyone’s. That being said, if the school had a learning management system such as Moodle running, a ning would possibly not be needed.

I also like the idea of creating a wiki as a class. This could be done as a class assignment, or a smaller group assignment if the class was bigger than about 3 or 4. I think I see the most potential with wikis out of all the various technologies experienced so far in this course. I like the idea of trying this in a Geography class, where individual pages could be created for keywords in specific topic. Each page would have to have the key term, a definition, an explanation, examples, and images. I can see the students really being involved in this, especially if their work is visible on the Internet. This is something I will try with my Geography class.

I will have to check out some of the wiki sites and see what they offer in terms of content moderation etc. I think that I would have to approve each page before it went live. I would also like to know if there is an open-source wiki package that can be hosted locally, or on our own website. That might be interesting too, and could be used as a development platform (for the local) and for a live site.

Interesting.