StigmergicWeb

A grade 11 biology class that I teach has been involved in an interesting project that I’ve meant to pass along to you. The course objectives include a study of classification of organisms and a study of some basic ecological principles. I wanted to combine these two into a long term project for the course on the study of species at risk, a topic that I think is only going to be of increasing concern as the effects of climate change begin to manifest in increasingly dramatic ways.

But I didn’t want to do the standard go-to-the-library-and-research-then-hand-in-a-report sort of project. I want to concentrate more on the process of the research than the product. To be honest, I still don’t know what I want to do as a final product. My students find this vaguely disorienting since they seem to be very focused on whatever that final product is. To be completely honest, I also hate marking essays, so if I will avoid it if I can.

In consultation with Donna DesRoches, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, we came upon the idea of having the students create a pathfinder - a sort of expert guide for a topic - to document their research process. We’re using a couple of tools for doing this:

• Wikka Wiki - a very robust, easy to use, easy to install wiki engine. One of the most important features of it is that it can easily integrate an RSS feed so that as the feed is updated, updates are automagically made on the wiki. It also provides RSS feeds for pages so that changes can be monitored and wiki-spammers can be thwarted. Wiki-spam actually hasn’t been a problem (we’ll see how it holds up once the URL to the project is posted). A pathfinder template page was created so that students can paste it into the pages for their species at risk.
• Scuttle - a free (beer and speech) social bookmarking tool. Similar to del.icio.us in many ways such as tagging, but we have the luxury of being able to resrict access to the school community so that there is no tag-poisoning by spammers. Scuttle can, like del.icio.us, create an RSS feed for a tag, so that it can be integrated into the student’s pathfinder on the wiki. You can download Scuttle and install it on your own server, and there is a small but growing Scuttle documentation wiki.

The students have each picked a species at risk from a list I posted on the Pathfinder wiki. They registered on the wiki to be able to edit it (take that, wiki spammers!), copied the student Pathfinder template to their species page, and started the research process. I had them focus on reference resources, especially print resources, for the first two days. After about a week back in the class, we went back to the library and I showed them how to bookmark, tag and comment web resources using Scuttle. The next session, I showed them how to integrate the RSS feed into their wiki page.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll have them do as a final product for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards having the work in pairs to prepare and present to an elementary classroom on one of the species they have researched, but I’m open to suggestions.

Links:

• Species at Risk Pathfinder research wiki assignment page
• Pathfinder template (thanks to Donna for putting this together)
• Species at Risk pathfinder list - links to students work. Some notable ones are:
  • Nilgiri Tahr
  • Peregrine Falcon

I’ve told my students I would publicize their research. If you have any comments, you could leave them here, or on the wiki pages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 13:27 and is filed under teaching, learning, education, digital resources, technology in education, RSS, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.