What is a Wiki?

Wikis support the use of the Web for composition and the posting of content by non-technical users. A wiki can be utilized in many ways; however, in the instructional environment, it can be used by students to become the "experts" as they format and generate a wiki on a classroom-based topic. This process gives the students ownership and includes them in the participation of the generation of knowledge with their assignments.
Example: Wikis are being utilized at CSUN.
The following is a visual image of how discussion boards, blogs, and wikis overlap ... interaction vectors and its outlier resources. The images can help put these social networking tools in perspective.

The keynote speaker at a recent conference I attended was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia , a free encyclopedia built collaboratively using wiki software. Wales continues to expand the concept of wikis to a broader sphere of knowledge-sharing and collaboration. For example, he mentioned a new wiki initiative called http://www.wikia.com/. Wikia will provide a space in a centralized wiki-community for anyone. This could be a space where an instructor can set up an instructional wiki. It is worth a look!

www.wikibooks.com has been created to begin to provide an alternative to textbooks with free, open-source wiki-books. If you are interested in such an alternative, you might discover some instructional options at this site.

If you have any questions, please let me know. Leslie

Faculty BeachBoard Training Still Available

Every Friday, an FCPD eLearning consultant visits the ITSS computer lab in room 219 on the 2nd floor of the library to be available for drop-in consultations with instructors. They have also offered workshops on BeachBoard tools, Turnitin (a plagiarism prevention software), and Calibrated Peer Review aka CPR. For more information, please visit the following URL: http://www.csulb.edu/lats/itss/design/workshops.html

If you have any questions, please let me know.
Leslie

Educause 2006 & Faculty Training

Educause, the premier conference on educational technology, showcased the concept of how faculty want to learn about technology (and how our students approach learning in the classroom especially from their socially networked worlds - but that's another posting.) Per Carl Berger, Univ of MI, faculty want to learn or be trained from the WINWINI – “What I need, when I need it" perspective.

So, we at ITSS continue to explore the implementation of instructional technology support models to meet the faculty's needs. Currently, there are drop-in sessions scheduled for every Friday afternoon in the ITSS computer lab where the eLearning consultants are available to consult on BeachBoard-related issues. The equipment in the computer lab is state-of-the-art with multiple software products to support the generation of instructional materials. For a complete list of the computer lab's software, please click on this link. Because of the library remodel, we are limited in the ability to provide hands-on workshops, but we hope to provide more online "WINWINNI" training. For example, we have created and posted BeachBoard Help files with step-by-step assistance in using BeachBoard tools so that they can be accessed outside of BeachBoard and also when logged in to BeachBoard. This is our first step in the process of providing "just in time" training services, and we plan to provide more training options in the future. Leslie

Welcome to the BeachBoard/ITSS Blog

This is a blog from CSULB Instructional Technology Support Services (ITSS) administration for CSULB instructors.