Learning Educational Technologies

During Spring 2007, I was enrolled in a Social, Cultural, and Philosophical Foundations of Education class at Thomas Nelson Community College. In the class, I had the opportunity to be a part of a program with ODU. The counterpart class at the University invited my class to team up with them to write the second edition of a version of a Foundations textbook that would be created on Wikibooks. Wikibooks is basically a source of textbooks of all different subjects, and it is free for people to use and view.

For the project, everyone wrote about a topic of their choice that would be contained in a Foundations text book. For instance, I chose the subject of Current Issues in School Reform.  There were many topics in which more than one person may have been writing an article, seeing as there were 250 contributions. We were to write up detailed and researched articles about our topic. We all formatted and posted the topic into our specific chapter in the book that corresponded with our topic. We then went into everyone’s article that was posted, and voted on which the best articles were. Those that had the most votes for a topic were published in the online book. My article, as well as 3 articles from my classmates, were chosen to be in the book.

This was a great experience for me to have. It was different from just writing a paper and it only being read by my teacher and, perhaps, a classmate or two. Now, I have a published work on the internet that all people could view, even potential employers.

This would even be a great way for students to research a topic and be able to share it with everyone. Even if it would not be posted online, and just created for classroom use, I think it would be a great way to incorporate technology in education.

If you want to read my article, please go to:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education/Second_Edition/20.1.26_Wildcard