Law Students

my classes, wikified

By Luis

Two of my classes this semester have class wikis:

• Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution
• Telecommunications

That would be two more than I’ve ever had before.

There are a few different spins you could put on this development. Along the student-faculty axis, it is putting more control in the hands of students. This is probably consistent with the institutional mission of actual student development, but we’ll see whether or not most students are actually willing to participate. (One of these professors will include wiki participation in the grade, the other has not indicate any such weighting.) In the institutional-’enterprise’ sense, it is taking some control out of the hands of university IT (who run our mostly competent but not exactly interactive current course website) and putting it in the hands of technically skilled professors (or at least those who have technically skilled support staff), which is consistent with larger trends in the software industry. And in the open source-proprietary sense, both of these are based on open source software, despite neither admin is exactly thrilled with the available options- contrast with the closed system used for the current course management tools elsewhere in the school.

Not completely a tangent: is there any good term for ‘a wiki user who is grumpy when other users don’t wikify things?’ Because I’m going to be that guy. :)

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on January 19, 2008 (boomark / email).