Activities 1 & 2
Activity 1 - Search EnginesThe three search engines that I used for this activity were Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com), Alta Vista (www.altavista.com), and All the Web (www.alltheweb.com). The search engine that returned the most useful "Top 5" results was actually an exact tie between Alta Vista and All the Web. They both returned the exact same first five results which were a lot better than the results that were returned via Ask Jeeves. (Besides the first result the rest were skimpy at best and at least two of the links did not work.) But with Alta Vista and All the Web the "top 5" results were made up of informational sites about wikis in general and then about their connection with education. The first search result was Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/wikis/index.htm) which provided Wiki history, why it works, and its uses in education as well as a list of additional resources related to wikis. The second search result was an article about Wikis in online education from Wiki Ed (http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Wikis_in_Online_Education) that gave a lot of useful information about using wikis in online distance education like ours :). The third research result was actually a link to many, many pages tagged with "wikis" on del.icio.us and I could of spent many hours looking at different websites but the one that really struck me was a web essay that was comparing blogs and wikis in higher education (http://www.anne-marie.scott.dsl.pipex.com/). The fourth research result was a Wiki about Education that gave advice about how to use wikis in education. Finally the fifth search result was a great article from the Science of Spectroscopy called Using a Wiki in Education ( http://scienceofspectroscopy.info/edit/index.php?title=Using_wiki_in_education). This article covered everything from what a wiki is, ways to use a wiki in education, courses using wiki, wiki tools, wiki related links and papers on wikis, etc... It was very informational and definitely gave a lot of resources for further research. Alta Vista and All the web definitely returned the best search results of the three.
Activity 2 - Evaluation
The site that I am choosing to evaluate is the fifth research result of the wiki from Science of Spectroscopy at http://scienceofspectroscopy.info/edit/index.php?title=Using_wiki_in_education. This site is very thorough and has a lot of really specific and useful information. According to the website evaluation the two aspects that I really like are the Design, Organization, and Ease of Use and the Purpose and Content. This wiki is designed to provide very useful information about the definition of wikis, ways to use wikis in education, one-page wikis, and full wiki web sites, wiki related links (that are all very good) and academic research on wikis. The purpose of this wiki is to provide educational and scholarly/research information. It provides balanced objective and factual information with well supported arguments. The site is also well designed and organized, easy to read and navigate with a table of content at the beginning to help find what you are looking for. Overall, this is a very informational and well organized site about wikis and education.
posted by Christine Parker @ 8:25 PM
5 Comments:
Christine--I used the same search engines and even reviewed the same site this week! Although I used to use Altavista regularly, I rely more on google and ask.com now, but after this search, I think I'm returning altavista to my search repertoire!
I'm interested in your evaluation of the Science of Spectroscopy page. At first glance it doesn't seem that this site can comment authoritatively on the use of Wikis in education. What on this site tells you that this is reliable information? Is there any?
Dan
Ellen- I agree, I really liked the results that I got with Altavista. It is funny how we pretty much did the exact same thing...I promise I was not coping you:)
To answer your question from ages ago... I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2003. I know you are older than me so I might not have been there when you were there. I was in the college of A&S and was also a Theta. Are you living in Bloomington now or just doing distance ed from Baltimore?
Dan- The reason that I find this information reliable is when I went back to the homepage of the Science of Spectroscopy I found that the site is used by Brown University, University of California - Santa Barbara, the National Research Council in Canada and more. It also seems to have links to NASA, Discovery School, NGFL home, etc. Finally it is linked to Stewart Mader's blog who was a man who has written some credible literature on wikis. The wiki in education wiki site also listed scholarly articles as additional references which I think showed the seriousness of the author. I think that this site is reliable for these reasons and it also did not provide any information that seemed unreliable. Therefore, while it may not be an authority on wikis I do think that I can get realiable, useful information from this site.
Beautiful! Just what I wanted :)
Thanks
Dan
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