I’d say more, if comments became conversations here.

As a graduate of Lausanne Collegiate School (I heard you speak at the 2007 Laptop Institute this summer and have read your blog ever since) and a freshman at Boston College, I was excited to hear you talk about this innovative style of teaching. Throughout my high school career at Lausanne my classes were constantly changing to accommodate for new and different technology; and while some of it worked and some of it didn’t, it was definitely understood that learning was not typical at my school. I knew leaving Lausanne I would be hard-pressed to find an institution as open to technology as Lausanne.

In my experience with Wikis, they are actually drastically more helpful than textbooks in many regards because they encourage students to actively put forth effort for learning. A teacher can ask you to read but that responsibility lies with you – you can either read or not. But when your entire grade and your learning experience revolves around a constantly-changing ‘book’ of personal opinions mixed with fact and analysis, you are forced to take a deeper look into the fundamentals of the subject you are studying and therefore more likely to throw in your two cents when you see a topic that interests you. Any teacher can tell you that a class room is always more lively when students are participating in discussion, but the opposite is true when students are reading from the book. In a world where technology is replacing books and hard-copy paper mediums, teachers need to compete to hold the interest of their students. I cannot think of a better way to do that while still keeping in touch with the idea of a techbook than to create a Wiki.

I hope that more professors begin to examine this style of teaching and classroom involvement. It would be great to see a Wiki used in a science course here.

There is an answer. The students do like we are in blogging. Monitor progress through interactive media and projects and the teacher can view the work online or on a “learning blog.” Is that a method for this type of new learning? Or am I off base?