Wikis for School Leaders

Using Technology to Improve Communication and Collaboration

Stephanie Sandifer

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317927556
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: Education General

Maximize the effectiveness of your professional activities through the use of wikis, and raise student achievement in turn! With strategies from online educator and technology expert Stephanie Sandifer, this book provides how-to advice on the way in which wikis result in a more efficient use of time, better communication, and increased adult learning for the members of your school community. Inside, you'll find out how to promote collaboration and productivity in your school, all while contributing to improved student learning.

Topics include:

• The Dos and Don'ts of Wikis
• Social Networking Tools and Wikis
• Wikis for Leadership and Administration
• Wikis in the Classroom
• Wikis for Home-to-School Communications

Implement each of these practical, innovative ideas and "wikify" your school today!

  1  

Organization and Collaboration in the B.W. (Before Wiki) Era

“To succeed in this new world, it will not be enough—indeed, it will be counterproductive—simply to intensify current policies, management strategies, and curricular approaches.”

—Tapscott and Williams

 

Ask any educator what his or her “core mission” is and most will respond with something along the lines of “education” or “learning” or “success for all students.” Most of our schools and our school districts include this language in their mission statements. Ask any educator what his or her number one priority is in daily responsibilities, and the response will usually relate to the mission of “education for all.” This is a noble mission to undertake, and many educators find it to be a most challenging task. The business of educating learners has become more complex over the past century, and our school systems have responded by adding more layers of everything from curriculum standards and policies, management and bureaucracy, to school structures and state and federal laws. The traditional approach to managing all these elements has been a hierarchical structure rooted in early 20th century management theory pioneered by German sociologist Max Weber (Lunenburg and Ornstein, 2004). With little variation, this model has dominated educational system structure throughout the past century.

In the late 20th century, management theory began to focus more on collaboration and flat organizations and less on hierarchical methods of organization. The education field, which acknowledged the challenges and failures of bureaucratic structures, gradually began to adopt the language of this movement toward building “learning organizations” (Senge et al., 2000). While educational leaders speak the language and promote more collaborative cultures in their learning organizations, the primary means of organization remains rooted in a hierarchical structure where decisions are made at the top and are handed down to the lower levels through mandates with very little input from the faculty and staff assigned to the campuses. The decision-making process is quite often very lengthy, requiring multiple stages of review, revision, and approval from several supervisors. In large districts, information and communications between and among departments and campuses is complicated if not nonexistent.

In the book Here Comes Everybody (2008), Clay Shirky explains the difficulties faced by traditional hierarchical organizations as they strive to achieve their core missions:

Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. (p. 29–30)

The key statement in the passage quoted is this: “ . . . its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.” What happens in our schools if our stated goal of improving student learning is relegated to number two status because the efforts to maintain discipline and structure pull our resources of time, attention, and money away from the focus on learning? Can you think of specific instances where other issues took precedence over a focus on learning on your campus?

Now look at your typical contemporary school district. Visit your local school district’s website and check off the following steps. Note how long it takes and how many levels of web pages were needed to find information.

_____		Locate a list of district departments. How many are there?
_____		Locate curriculum documents.
_____		Locate information about athletic facilities.
_____		Find a staff directory.
_____		Locate the technology equipment standards.

_____		Locate the weekly lunch menu.
_____		Locate purchasing procedures.
_____		Locate up-to-date employee memos.
_____		View the current district calendar and make note of how many district-level meetings are listed. Are they listed?

Are any of the documents located behind password-protected portals? Why? How many of the sources are web pages and how many are .pdf files (Adobe) that require downloading before they can be viewed? Why?

Here is another exercise. Stop what you are doing right now and look around your office. How many three-ring binders do you see? How many bookshelves are taken up with those binders? When was the last time you opened one of those binders? How useful is this printed information if you never refer to it, and how much waste occurs from the excessive printing of documents that simply sit on office and classroom shelves after the training, in-service, or meeting has ended?

The point of these exercises is to build awareness of the complexity of a typical district’s organization. This complexity mirrors what Shirky describes above, and it begs the question: How good are we at staying focused on our number one priority of “educating all students”? If you have spent even one semester in an educational leadership position, you have enough experience to know the demands placed upon everyone in the system, and the difficulty in focusing on the mission when faced with numerous meetings, action items, the barrage of emails, endless and often redundant paperwork requirements, and the always unpredictable “emergency.” Indeed, our school leaders are forced to spend much more time focusing on discipline and structure rather than focusing on instruction and learning experiences.

Conscientious education leaders should ask themselves: Is there a better way to manage all this information and communication? There is—and we call it a “wiki.”

2

What Is A Wiki?

You might be surprised to learn that wikis are older than the recent Web 2.0 technologies that are so prevalent across the Internet. Wikis have been around since the mid-1990s when the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb, was developed by Ward Cunningham. Wikis were initially used only by technology teams in the development of software and hardware systems. The word “wiki” is the Hawaiian word for “fast,” and as you become more familiar with how wikis work you will see why that term is so appropriate. Wikipedia, perhaps the best-known wiki, on Jan. 27, 2011, defined “wiki” as

. . . a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used to create collaborative works. Examples include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and note services. The software can also be used for personal note taking. (http://­en.­wikipedia.­org/­wiki/­Wiki)

Essentially, a wiki is a website that can be edited by anyone or by anyone with appropriate privileges if the wiki is restricted to registered users. Most important, a wiki is a website that can be edited by anyone, without needing to know HTML (hypertext markup language) or some other scripting language. At the most basic level, editng a wiki is as easy as editing a document in a word processor or an email. While wikis are simple to use, they can include added functionality that give the users a robust set of collaborative features including embedded media such as videos, streaming video, slideshows, shared calendars, databases, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, to name a few.

Public Wikis vs. Enterprise Wikis

Despite the common misperception (due to media coverage of Wikipedia) that wikis are open documents vulnerable to vandalism, wikis can be tig...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Free Downloads
• Introduction
• 1 Organization and Collaboration in the B.W. (Before Wiki) Era
• 2 What Is A Wiki?
• 3 Why Use A Wiki?
• 4 When & Where?
• 5 How?—Making It Work in Your Organization
• 6 Sustaining Wikis
• 7 Web 2.0 Tools That Support Wiki Use
• 8 Wiki Continued—Edit This Chapter
• Resources for Successful Wiki Use
• PBWorks Syntax
• MediaWiki Syntax
• Habit Building Guide
• Teacher 2.0/Administrator 2.0 One Step at a Time: A Week-by-Week Guide to Building Web 2.0 Habits
• Getting Started: Computer and Web Browser
• RSS & Aggregators: Create an Account and Subscribe to the Web
• Organizing Your Feeds
• Share Your Subscriptions
• Creating Your iGoogle Home Page
• Blog Reading
• Wikifying Your Work
• Glossary
• Recommended Resources
• References