was significantly higher for many of the skills. Jean says, "I was shocked to get this positive change in the delta - I was just hoping it wouldn’t go backward!". But, in fact, the improvement was statistically significant.

Jim Vanides, B.S.M.E, M.Ed.
Program Manager - Worldwide Higher Education Grants
HP Global Social Investment
Hewlett-Packard

For information about the HP Technology for Teaching philanthropy initiative in higher education, visit www.hp.com/go/hpteach-hied

Jim Vanides, B.S.M.E, M.Ed.
Program Manager - Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy
Hewlett-Packard

For information about the HP Technology for Teaching philanthropy initiative in higher education, visit www.hp.com/go/hpteach-hied

I may be a little slow out of the starting gate when it comes to Wiki technology, but I’m finally taking a close look at how they can be used. I’m impressed. But why aren’t there more being used in education?

I actually heard about Wiki technology a few years ago, but I was either asleep, not in a creative mood, or I simply missed the point. Then wikipedia came along (http://www.wikipedia.org/), and now millions of people know what a wiki is – or at least have been exposed to the idea of people collaborating together to build structured web content by directly editing webpages. If you’d like to know more about how they work, check out http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents.

Imagine – dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of people who know something (or think they do) building a website together. The parallels with how people learn are obvious to the Constructivists among us, as this can be an example of people “constructing knowledge” together. If you add some facilitation and coaching to a wiki world, it starts to look like some classrooms I’ve seen.

Now to my point: Where are all the classroom wiki’s?

Yes, I’ll admit that just because I’m not hearing about the massive use of wiki’s by educators around the world doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. So I am tossing out this challenge: Show me some examples where wiki’s are supporting learning in higher education. I am also interested in hearing your thoughts on why they work (or don’t) in a learning setting.

I’ll start with one: The Colorado School of Mines physics courses, which are taught in face-to-face classrooms but are supported by the Physiki that they built (http://ticc.mines.edu/csm/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). (I must also note that it is largely created and supported by the students themselves. Bravo!).

I look forward to your examples!