So, one of the projects I inherited when I took my job at Lovett was the Create-Your-Own-Website assignment. In brief, students create websites using Mozilla Seamonkey—an open-source WYSIWYG* HTML editor—in the context of science and geography classes. The question that I’ve been asking myself for about a year is whether I ought to switch from this traditional Web1.0 way of creating sites to teaching wikis instead. What is lost, and what is gained in the process? Read on for my reflections.
The way I teach this is to give a couple days of instruction to all the students on how to create a website using Seamonkey. It’s a pretty involved process. I take some time to explain how websites are different from Word documents, and I show them some sample content. We start by creating page templates and creating links between them, and then once they learn how to insert images and create external links, they’re off to the races.
Well, except for one more thing. File management. Every year I’m betting better at nipping more problems in the bud, but it’s a bear of an issue no matter how much effort I put into teaching it.
Up to this point in their digital lives, many of the kids have never had to manage and coordinate lots of files. Most things they turn in are single files, and here we are asking them to set up a hierarchy of folders. Because of the way our server works, they can’t work directly from their mounted server folder (nor would it be a good idea anyway, since they need to keep backup copies). So they download a copy from the server, work on the local copy, and then upload it when they’re done working.
Folders get dragged inside folders. Students work on the server copy without realizing it. Backups get lost. Files get moved away from their “home” locations (e.g. out of the website folder onto the desktop) and links are broken. This causes student and teacher frustration, as focus is diverted away from geography and science content (and even web technology content) towards management.
Enter wikis. I’ve been aware of them ever since Wikipedia started… But it was the first time that I saw an AJAX-alicous WYSIWYG editor that the lights really went on.** I believe wikis will completely replace creating and uploading a hierarchy of HTML and media files—at least for everyone who’s not a professional web designer.
I’ve pretty much decided to ditch Seamonkey in favor of a wiki-based project for next year, because when you get down to it, learning file management skills is, though not completely unproductive, certainly a side effect of learning to digitally publish information. So now I’m just trying to shift my perspective and figure out how to carry over the web publishing DNA from the original project while taking advantage of the wiki paradigm. I have a feeling that it will become a lot more connective and less isolated.
My real questions are related to the pedagogy. What do I want the students to learn? How do I effectively teach web publishing using this tool? Is there anything (apart from file-management skills) that I’m going to lose in the process?
I’m looking forward to finding answers to these questions.
* What You See Is What You Get.
** What I’m really waiting for, of course, is an open-source wiki that includes a WYSIWYG editor. This is the final barrier between lots of teachers and students and effective, time-efficient web publishing that you can host locally and avoid problems with externally hosted sites (such as inappropriate advertisements).
