Search 40+ edutech wikis
June 8, 2012, [MD]
Did you know that there are more than 40 educational technology wikis out there? Of course, Wikipedia can be a good starting source, to look up concepts such as constructivism or cognitive psychology, but sometimes you want a more specialized source, and one that isn't constrained by Wikipedia's community norms (in academia, point of view isn't always such a bad thing).
I was first excited to come across EduTechWiki, hosted at TECFA in Geneva, checking out articles about learner autonomy or something as specific as the ArgueGraph script (a very comprehensive article, which probably would have been speedy-deleted from Wikipedia for lack of "notability"). However, as I kept exploring, I realized there's actually a huge amount of educational technology wikis out there. I began collecting these on a wikipage, using the webclipping functionality.
From these wikis, we can find articles about topics as different as technology and education in Western history, storyboarding, epistemic affordance, knowledge components, cognitive neuroscience discoveries, multiple intelligences, and a whole lote more (all of the links are from different wikis). Of course, one has to wonder if there aren't ways of better harnessing all of this great information and analysis, which is scattered around on multiple sites (some more or less abandoned, and probably not frequently visited). I have thought a lot about having all the citations on such wikis be semantic, enabling you to quickly display which pages have cited a certain article, etc.
However, for now, I came up with a much more "brute force" approach, which nevertheless works pretty well. Google allows you to create a Custom Search Engine, which accepts a list of URL patterns to search, and which can be embedded anywhere. I extracted the root URLs from all the wikis I have listed, and added the four Researchr wikis (all of which are roughly about edutech topics), as well as the Encore Wiki which contains notes from many of the members of my lab, and some relevant University of Toronto courses. You can try the result below, I've also embedded this search in my wiki page listing edutech wikis, and if you view source, you can easily copy the code and embed it anywhere else. Let me know in the comments here or on my wiki if you want to add any new sources.
Happy searching!
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Stian
Stian Håklev June 8, 2012 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus