a new wiki is born ...
As part of my class this semester we are going to use a wiki to create an environment for students to post articles that relate to the chapter materials etc. I have signed up for an account on jot and have created http://buad47705fall.jot.com. Classes begin wednesday of next week, so I have a couple of days to play around with this environment, learn it, and determine the specifics of the student team project (individual projects for students includes creating their own blog).

So far what have I learned ? Wikis are pretty cool for sure. I have just added feeds to the two pages I have created thus far to my bloglines account, so the management of watching out for updates seems similar to blogs, which is very cool. The version control system looks pretty slick too. I can see when pages were last updated, compare versions etc. This should enable me to see which students contributed what to a content area. Of course I will learn more about this as students start contributing to the project.

Anyway, so far, I am pretty excited!

a new blog is born ...
Info Tech Applications in Marketing has just been created. Actually I copied and pasted most of the content from Intro. to Marketing (why redo work when its not necessary)!

I will be spending most of friday working on this blog to reinvent the class project and rework the text so the blog fits the different class. For the class project I am determined to use a wiki as a platform for a group project for the students. Likely I will assign each group of students a chapter or two (I have not even seen the book yet, so am unsure of this), to become topic experts and create the wiki that basically supports the chapter(s). The wiki would need to be ready by one of the final classes, by which time I will have each team present their wiki as chapter experts. I am hoping it is a decent means to go over the material again (good prep for the final) as well as expose the students to wikis. I am also wondering if students not involved in a particular wiki should get credit for outside contribution ?

Each student will also be responsible for setting up a blog centered on a topic which they are passionate about. This topic must also have an entry in wikipedia. They are tasked with creating a great blog, while also contributing to the wikipedia entry on said topic. I will have to establish some decent parameters for this for sure (as I will need to do for the group project above) but it should be fun.

One really important, outstanding item, is which wiki platform I can use ? It needs to be a free and a hosted solution (I am thinking jotspot ? Anyone having any ideas, PLEASE let me know).

OK, that was simply a brain dumb to help frame my thinking for the next couple of days.