Blogging Clicks With Colleges

First the Internet turned colleges upside down, extending classrooms and changing the way people learned. Next came Napster and other file-sharing tools, then Web logs. Now blogs are morphing into the next big thing on campus: wikis.

The wiki, which got its name from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” is the scrappy 零碎湊成的 little brother to the blog, an interactive Web page that can be changed by anyone who stumbles upon 絆倒、偶然碰見 it. While blogs let people publish their thoughts online, wikis take things a step further, creating freewheeling, collaborative communities: Students can edit one another's work, bounce ideas around or link to infinite other Web sites.

Sometimes wikis don‘t click. But at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some like debates and some shimmy 跳狐步舞 in and out of topics with music, photos and video pulling readers along.
One of Phillipson's students drew a picture of a poem; another made a movie. Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking and questioning.


Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they're just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they're popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.

Blogs already have seeped into everyday life on campus. At Johns Hopkins, two juniors just set up a service for students and faculty to start their own blogs. Georgetown University tinkered 焊鍋、粗修 with software to make it easy for professors to create blogs. There are course blogs on religion, war, literature, even cattle, at Texas A&M University.