Wednesday, December 21, 2005

What's the Difference?

....between Discussion Boards, Blogs, & Wikis?

David Warlick offers this simple difference:
Discussion boards [a.k.a. forums] are about collaborative idea building. It is a conversation where the goal is to build new knowledge by stacking student ideas, insights, and perspectives on top of each other.

Blogging is about idea publishing. It certainly has the idea building, conversation element. However, what is central to the activity is for a person to write a well thought out (with the exception of my blogs), compellingly constructed document. It's about publishing. However, the interaction, commenting, and cross-blogging all happen and are instructive in exactly the same way as discussion board.

Wikis are about collaborative document building. A group of students work together to construct an effective study guide for their next test, as an example.

Source: WWWEDU
Richard Kassissieh at KassBlog talks about his schools use of Discussion Boards, Blogging, & Wikis. His school uses all 3 while we are just beginning to get our feet wet with Blogs.

I was particularly interested in Richard's reflection on his school's experience with blogs and their lagging success as compared to the other tools. He states:
More students have to spend more time thinking and writing in order to build a blog community, and your blog won't even get noticed until you have written powerfully and long enough to make an impact on other people.
So why haven't Blogs, Wiki's and Discussion Boards caught on here in Puyallup? or have they?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home


 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.