Wikis or Blogs – What’s the difference?
Posted by Lois on 8th July 2008
Below are the links to the sites I have made so that you can compare them for yourselves. Leave me a message and tell me what you think.
Scratch and MicroWorld’s sites
Blog – http://loisath.wordpress.com/
Wiki – http://scratch-n-microworlds.wikispaces.com/IWB@BLPS
Blog – http://loisath.globalteacher.org.au/
Wiki – http://berwicklodgeps-iwb.wetpaint.com/?mail=1124&t=anon
The following site gives a summary from some students’ perspectives that I think sum up the key differences.
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2006/05/my-students-compare-and-contrast-wikis.html
“Synopsis of their posts
The most meaningful point that they have brought out for me is that they see wikis as a place to share information and they see blogs as a place to share opinions and discuss.”
MY EXPERIENCE
It was while I was completing my major project that I started to realise the WordPress blog site was not quite what I wanted. I didn’t so much want a blog that would be mostly my ideas but a place where all teachers could contribute equally. By this time however (because I was quite excited by the new found possibilities) I had already started a second blog for the Interactive Whiteboard Team at our school. This time I was using a blog for educators – globalteacher.org.
Increasingly I was becoming frustrated with trying to upload files. The first blog was difficult to upload video files, the second refused to upload Smartboard notebook files. SO I decided to try out a wiki instead.
It wasn’t difficult to copy and paste the blog pages into the WikiSpaces wiki. I was in fact very pleased with how easily all the files transferred across. WikiSpaces doesn’t look as flash as the WordPress site but it was very user friendly. Now that I was confident that wikis’ were the way to go for collaboration, sharing, and uploading I decided to transfer my Globalteacher site to a wiki as well. This time I thought I’d try a WetPaint wiki. I had just happened to see one at the ICTEV conference, that another teacher was using with his students. This time copying and pasting wasn’t quite as easy. There were some pages on the WetPaint template that I would like to delete and can’t. I’m not convinced that the WetPaint Wiki is as flexible and user friendly as the WikiSpaces.
Of course there are still new wikis to try. It is amazing what is out there for free especially for education. If you email the administrators of the wiki sites they will take the ads off your pages as well.
Posted in Staff PD, blogs, wikis | No Comments »
