Forums, Blogs & Wikis
Forums
Forums are online discussion boards that allow people to
interact and post in topics of interest. They can be maintained in
professional or personal styles, with many forums mixing both
styles seamlessly.
Each course within Blackboard has discussion boards, which you
may find useful to use with your students and as a way to record
collaborative discussion and work.
Blogs
A blog is effectively an online journal, allowing you to create
entries as often or as little as you like. The added benefit over
some traditional methods is that rich content such as images, audio
and video can all be embedded into blog posts.
Blogs are also good for both reflective and informative writing.
Some people use them to keep people informed on updates i.e.
upcoming sessions and links to other interesting material that may
support students. Others, particularly students, find blogs useful
as reflective tools as they can record all their thoughts and
feelings relating to their studies. They are also a good way for
students to record supporting evidence they find online which might
otherwise be read and then forgotten about with no record of it
being used.
Some popular websites to create free blogs are:
Micro-blogging
A fast-expanding type of service is micro-blogging, where
users can simply post short updates typically around 100-140
characters in length. These provide a quick overview into what the
person is doing at the time. Some types of services like this
include:
Wikis
A 'wiki' is a piece of software, usually operating openly on the
Internet, which allows users to create, edit and maintain pages.
The biggest example, and one which you may well have used yourself,
is Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopaedia which runs though a
wiki.
You can set up dedicated wikis for your area quickly and easily
using some free online tools. Another way to try
using a wiki is as a place where work is created and recorded
during group tasks.
Free, online wikis you might want to try include: